The Power of the Powerless

Vaclav Havel

October, 1978

I

A SPECTER is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what inthe West is called “dissent” This specter has not appeared out ofthin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the presenthistorical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a timewhen this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itselfon the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power,eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, thesystem has become so ossified politically that there is practicallyno way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its officialstructures.

Who are these so-called dissidents? Where does their point ofview come from, and what. importance does it have? What isthe significance of the “independent initiatives in which “dissidentscollaborate, and what real chances do such initiatives have of suc-cess? Is it appropriate to refer to “dissidents as an opposition?If so, what exactly is such an opposition within the framework ofthis system? What does it do? What role does it play in society?What are its hopes and on what are they based? Is it within thepower of the “dissidents—as a category of subcitizen outside thepower establishment—to have any influence at all on society andthe social system? Can they actually change anything?

I think that an examination of these questions-an examinationof the potential of the “powerless-can only begin with an examina-tion of the nature of power in the circumstances in which thesepowerless people operate.

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II

Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or,more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy overa society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I amafraid that the term “dictatorship, regardless of how intelligible itmay otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real na-ture of power in this system. We usually associate the term withthe notion of a small group of people who take over the governmentof a given country by force; their power is wielded openly, using thedirect instruments of power at their disposal, and they are easilydistinguished socially from the majority over whom they rule. Oneof the essential aspects of this traditional or classical notion of dic-tatorship is the assumption that it is temporary, ephemeral, lack-ing historical roots. Its existence seems to be bound up with thelives of those who established it. It is usually local in extent andsignificance, and regardless of the ideology it utilizes to grant itselflegitimacy, its power derives ultimately from the numbers and thearmed might of its soldiers and police. The principal threat to itsexistence is felt to be the possibility that someone better equippedin this sense might appear and overthrow it.

Even this very superficial overview should make it clear that thesystem in which we live has very little in common with a classicaldictatorship. In the first place, our system is not limited in a local,geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over a huge power bloccontrolled by one of the two superpowers. And although it quitenaturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, therange of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a sin-gle, unifying framework throughout the power bloc. Not only is thedictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and struc-tured in the same way (that is, in the way evolved by the rulingsuper power), but each country has been completely penetrated bya network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the super-power center and totally subordinated to its interests. In the stale-mated world of nuclear parity, of course, that circumstance endowsthe system with an unprecedented degree of external stability com-pared with classical dictatorships. Many local crises which, in anisolated state, would lead to a change in the system, can be re-

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solved through direct intervention by the armed forces of the restof the bloc.

In the second place, if a feature of classical dictatorships is theirlack of historical roots (frequently they appear to be no more thanhistorical freaks, the fortuitous consequence of fortuitous socialprocesses or of human and mob tendencies), the same cannot besaid so facilely about our system. For even though our dictatorshiphas long since alienated itself completely from the social move-ments that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements(and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements ofthe nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity. These ori-gins provided a solid foundation of sorts on which it could builduntil it became the utterly new social and political reality it is to-day, which has become so inextricably a part of the structure ofthe modern world. A feature of those historical origins was the“correct understanding of social conflicts in the period from whichthose original movements emerged. The fact that at the very core ofthis “correct understanding there was a genetic disposition towardthe monstrous alienation characteristic of its subsequence devel-opment is not essential here. And in any case, this element alsogrew organically from the climate of that time and therefore can besaid to have its origin there as well.

One legacy of that original “correct understanding is a third pe-culiarity that makes our systems different from other modern dic-tatorships: it commands an incomparably more precise, logicallystructured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremelyflexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, isalmost a secularized religion. It of fears a ready answer to anyquestion whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, andaccepting it has profound implications for human life. In an erawhen metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of cri-sis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losingtheir sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably hasa certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers animmediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and sud-denly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new mean-ing, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneli-ness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the

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price is abdication of one s own reason, conscience, and responsi-bility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment ofreason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involvedhere is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.(In our case, the connection with Byzantine theocracy is direct: thehighest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual au-thority.) It is true of course that, all this aside, ideology no longerhas any great influence on people, at least within our bloc (withthe possible exception of Russia, where the serf mentality, with itsblind, fatalistic respect for rulers and its automatic acceptance ofall their claims, is still dominant and combined with a superpowerpatriotism which traditionally places the interests of empire higherthan the interests of humanity). But this is not important, becauseideology plays its role in our system very well (an issue to which Iwill return) precisely because it is what it is.

Fourth, the technique of exercising power in traditional dicta-torships contains a necessary element of improvisation. The mech-anisms for wielding power are for the most part not establishedfirmly, and there is considerable room for accident and for the ar-bitrary and unregulated application of power. Socially, psycholog-ically, and physically, conditions still exist for the expression ofsome form of opposition. In short, there are many seams on thesurface which can split apart before the entire power structure hasmanaged to stabilize. Our system, on the other hand, has beendeveloping in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, and for approx-imately thirty years in Eastern Europe; moreover, several of itslong-established structural features are derived from Czarist abso-lutism. In terms of the physical aspects of power, this has led tothe creation of such intricate and well-developed mechanisms forthe direct and indirect manipulation of the entire population that,as a physical power base, it represents something radically new.At the same time, let us not forget that the system is made signif-icantly more effective by state ownership and central direction ofall the means of productionThis gives the power structure an un-precedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself (in theareas of the bureaucracy and the police, for example) and makesit easier for that structure, as the sole employer, to manipulate theday-to-day existence of all citizens.

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Finally, if an atmosphere of revolutionary excitement, heroism,dedication, and boisterous violence on all sides characterizes clas-sical dictatorships, then the last traces of such an atmosphere havevanished from the Soviet bloc. For, some time now this bloc hasceased to be a kind of enclave, isolated from the rest of the de-veloped world and immune to processes occurring in it. To thecontrary, the Soviet bloc is an integral part of that larger world,and it shares and shapes the worlds destiny. This means in con-crete terms that the hierarchy of values existing in the developedcountries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society (thelong period of co-existence with the West has only hastened thisprocess)In other words, what we have here is simply another formof the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant so-cial, intellectual, and psychological consequences. It is impossibleto understand the nature of power in our system properly withouttaking this into account.

The profound difference between our system-in terms of the na-ture of power-and what we traditionally understand by dictator-ship, a difference I hope is clear even from this quite superficialcomparison, has caused me to search for some term appropriatefor our system, purely for the purposes of this essay. If I refer to ithenceforth as a “posttotalitarian system, I am fully aware that thisis perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think ofa better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix “poso that thesystem is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it istotalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dicta-torships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understandit.

The circumstances I have mentioned, however, form only a cir-cle of conditional factors and a kind of phenomenal framework forthe actual composition of power in the posttotalitarian system, sev-eral aspects of which I shall now attempt to identify.

III

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window,among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world,

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unite! Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate tothe world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unityamong the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great thathe feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with hisideals? Has he really given more than a moments thought to howsuch a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming major-ity of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in theirwindows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. Thatposter was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise head-quarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all intothe window simply because it has been done that way for years,because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be.If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproachedfor not having the proper decoration in his window; someone mighteven accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these thingsmust be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousandsof details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmonywith society,” as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic contentof the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his win-dow from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the idealit expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action hasno motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicatesnothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it con-tains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might beexpressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I knowwhat I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I canbe depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient andtherefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, ofcourse, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengro-cers superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects thegreengrocer from potential informers. The slogans. real meaning,therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocers existence. It reflectshis vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to dis-play the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedi-ent; he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even

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though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocerwould be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocalstatement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quitenaturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense ofhis own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression ofloyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textualsurface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allowthe greengrocer to say, “Whats wrong with the workers of the worlduniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from him-self the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time conceal-ing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facadeof something high. And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers hu-man beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of moralitywhile making it easier for them to part with them. As the repositoryof something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to de-ceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their in-glorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignifiedway of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is di-rected toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which hu-man beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization,and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that every-one can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losinghis job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workersof the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in stayingin power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the workingclass. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is toprovide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitariansystem, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with thehuman order and the order of the universe.

The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by moderniza-tion the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictatorcan be exercised- In other words, the dictator can employ more orless naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating tothe world and of self-justification which ideology involves. But themore complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger andmore stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have

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operated historically, the more individuals must be connected tothem from outside, and the greater the importance attached to theideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regimeand the people, across which the regime approaches the peopleand the people approach the regime. This explains why ideol-ogy plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system:that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts,and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in count-less ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance,would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as itsall-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.

IV

Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims oflife there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves to-ward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and selforganization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom,the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, anddiscipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbablestructures, the posttotalitarian system contrives to force life intoits most probable states. The aims of the system reveal its most es-sential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward beingever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means thatthe radius of its influence is continually widening as well. Thissystem serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure thatpeople will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, any-thing which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles isregarded by the system as an attack upon itself And in this respectit is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine de-nial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aimof the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of powerin the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at firstsight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subor-dinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism whichdrives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in thehierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be

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worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fueland serve this automatism. For this reason, an individuals desirefor power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides withthe direction of the automatism of the system.

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system andthe individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system andthe aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the systemderive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearancestrying to pass for reality.

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but itdoes so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the systemis so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government bybureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is en-slaved in the name of the work ing class; the complete degradationof the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; deprivingpeople of in formation is called making it available; the use of powerto manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbi-trary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repres-sion of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperialinfluence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack offree expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elec-tions become the highest form of democracy; banning independentthought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occu-pation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captiveto its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. Itfalsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics.It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled policeapparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to per-secute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretendnothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but theymust behave as though they did, or they must at least toleratethem in silence, or get along well with those who work with them.For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need notaccept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life withit and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system,fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

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V

We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocers slogan hasnothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Evenso, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensiblebecause the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty(and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in theonly way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting theprescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by acceptingthe given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himselfbecome a player in the game, thus making it possible for the gameto go on, for it to exist in the first place.

If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and theindividual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to thisbridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the systemand the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ide-ology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution ofpower by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the momentthat excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becomingan active component of that power. It begins to function as theprincipal instrument of ritual communication within the system ofpower.

The whole power structure (and we have already discussed itsphysical articulation) could not exist at all if there were not a cer-tain metaphysical order binding all its components together, in-terconnecting them and subordinating them to a uniform methodof accountability, supplying the combined operation of all thesecomponents with rules of the game, that is, with certain regula-tions, limitations, and legalities. This metaphysical order is fun-damental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure;it integrates its communication system and makes possible the in-ternal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It israther like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, givingthe process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guaran-tees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It isthe glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrumentof its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarianstructure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms

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chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated partic-ular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarianpower, deprived of the element that binds it together, would col-lapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideologyis always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure.Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from real-ity, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societieswhere there is public competition for power and therefore pub-lic control of that power, there also exists quite naturally publiccontrol of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Con-sequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctivesthat effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether.Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, andthus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more andmore removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has al-ready become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appear-ances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semanticcontact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signsthat replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time anincreasingly important component of power, a pillar providing itwith both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As thisaspect grows n importance, and as it gradually loses touch withreality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomesreality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that oncertain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have evengreater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosityof the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden be-hind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from thephenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in theideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather thereverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it doesto reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirelydependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxicalresult: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, powerbegins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropri-ated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It

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then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makesdecisions that affect people, and not the other way around.

If ideology is the principal guarantee of the inner consistency ofpower, it becomes at the same time an increasingly important guar-antee of its continuity. Whereas succession to power in classicaldictatorship is always a rather complicated affair (the pretendershaving nothing to give their claims reasonable legitimacy, therebyforcing them always to resort to confrontations of naked power),in the post-totalitarian system power is passed on from person toperson, from clique to clique, and from generation to generation inan essentially more regular fashion. In the selection of pretenders,a new “king-maker” takes part: it is ritual legitimation, the abilityto rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were,to be borne aloft by it. Naturally, power struggles exist in the post-totalitarian system as well, and most of them are far more brutalthan in an open society, for the struggle is not open, regulatedby democratic rules, and subject to public control, but hidden be-hind the scenes. (It is difficult to recall a single instance in whichthe First Secretary of a ruling Communist Party has been replacedwithout the various military and security forces being placed atleast on alert.) This struggle, however, can never (as it can in clas-sical dictatorships) threaten the very essence of the system and itscontinuity. At most it will shake up the power structure, which willrecover quickly precisely because the binding substance-ideologyremains undisturbed. No matter who is replaced by whom, suc-cession is only possible against the backdrop and within the frame-work of a common ritual. It can never take place by denying thatritual.

Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power be-comes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in theritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequentlyit seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity intothe light of power. Is it not characteristic of the post-totalitariansystem that, on all levels of the power hierarchy, individuals areincreasingly being pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, thoseuniformed flunkeys of the rituals and routines of power?

The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehuman-ized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automa-

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tism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the diktats ofthis automatism which select people lacking individual will for thepower structure, that it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrasewhich summons to power people who use empty phrases as thebest guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian systemwill continue.

Western Sovietologists often exaggerate the role of individualsin the post-totalitarian system and overlook the fact that the rulingfigures, despite the immense power they possess through the cen-tralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executorsof the systems own internal laws-laws they themselves never can,and never do, reflect upon. In any case, experience has taught usagain and again that this automatism is far more powerful thanthe will of any individual; and should someone possess a more in-dependent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymousmask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchyat all. And when the individual finally gains a place there and triesto make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormousinertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual willbe ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or hewill be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once againblending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almostindistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who willfollow. (Let us recall, for instance, the development of Husk or Go-mukka.) The necessity of continually hiding behind and relating toritual means that even the more enlightened members of the powerstructure are often obsessed with ideology. They are never able toplunge straight to the bottom of naked reality, and they alwaysconfuse it, in the final analysis, with ideological pseudoreality. (Inmy opinion, one of the reasons the Dub?ek leadership lost controlof the situation in 1968 was precisely because, in extreme situ-ations and in final questions, its members were never capable ofextricating themselves completely from the world of appearances.)

It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of in-ternal communication which assures the power structure of innercohesion is, in the posttotalitarian system, some thing that tran-scends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates itto a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its conti-

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nuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the systems external stabil-ity. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. Itis built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to livewithin the lie.

VI

Why in fact did our greengrocer have to put his loyalty on displayin the shop window? Had he not already displayed it sufficiently invarious internal or semipublic ways? At trade union meetings, afterall, he had always voted as he should. He had always taken part invarious competitions. He voted in elections like a good citizen. Hehad even signed the “antiCharter.” Why, on top of all that, shouldhe have to declare his loyalty publicly? After all, the people whowalk past his window will certainly not stop to read that, in thegreengrocers opinion, the workers of the world ought to unite. Thefact of the matter is, they dont read the slogan at all, and it can befairly assumed they dont even see it. If you were to ask a womanwho had stopped in front of his shop what she saw in the window,she could certainly tell whether or not they had tomatoes today,but it is highly unlikely that she noticed the slogan at all, let alonewhat it said.

It seems senseless to require the greengrocer to declare his loy-alty publicly. But it makes sense nevertheless. People ignore hisslogan, but they do so because such slogans are also found in othershop windows, on lampposts, bulletin boards, in apartment win-dows, and on buildings; they are everywhere, in fact. They formpart of the panorama of everyday life. Of course, while they ignorethe details, people are very aware of that panorama as a whole.And what else is the greengrocers slogan but a small component inthat huge backdrop to daily life?

The greengrocer had to put the slogan in his window, therefore,not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it,but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to thepanorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, ofcourse, has a subliminal meaning as well: it reminds people wherethey are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what

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everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do aswell, if they dont want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienatethemselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk theloss of their peace and tranquility and security.

The woman who ignored the greengrocers slogan may well havehung a similar slogan just an hour before in the corridor of the of-fice where she works. She did it more or less without thinking,justas our greengrocer did, and she could do so precisely because shewas doing it against the background of the general panorama andwith some awareness of it, thai is, against the background of thepanorama of which the greengrocers shop window forms a part.When the greengrocer visits her office, he will not notice her sloganeither, just as she failed to notice his. Nevertheless, their slogansare mutually dependent: both were displayed with some awarenessof the general panorama and, we might say, under its diktat. Both,however, assist in the creation of that panorama, and thereforethey assist in the creation of that diktat as well. The greengrocerand the office worker have both adapted to the conditions in whichthey live, but in doing so, they help to create those conditions. Theydo what is done, what is to be done, what must be done, but at thesame time—by that very token—they confirm that it must be donein fact. They conform to a particular requirement and in so do-ing they themselves perpetuate that requirement. Metaphysicallyspeaking, without the greengrocers slogan the office workers slo-gan could not exist, and vice versa. Each proposes to the other thatsomething be repeated and each accepts the others proposal. Theirmutual indifference to each others slogans is only an illusion: inreality, by exhibiting their slogans, each compels the other to ac-cept the rules of the game and to confirm thereby the power thatrequires the slogans in the first place. Quite simply, each helps theother to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control, but atthe same time they are its subjects as well. They are both victimsof the system and its instruments.

If an entire district town is plastered with slogans that no onereads, it is on the one hand a message from the district secretaryto the regional secretary, but it is also something more: a smallexample of the principle of social auto-totality at work. Part ofthe essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws every-

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one into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselvesas human beings, but so they may surrender their human iden-tity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so they may be-come agents of the systems general automatism and servants ofits self-determined goals, so they may participate in the commonresponsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it,like Faust by Mephistopheles. More than this: so they may createthrough their involvement a general norm and, thus, bring pres-sure to bear on their fellow citizens. And further: so they maylearn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify withit as though it were something natural and inevitable and, ulti-mately, so they may—with no external urging—come to treat anynon-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack onthemselves, as a form of dropping out of society. By pulling ev-eryone into its power structure, the posttotalitarian system makeseveryone an instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality ofsociety.

Everyone, however, is in fact involved and enslaved, not only thegreengrocers but also the prime ministers. Differing positions inthe hierarchy merely establish differing degrees of involvement: thegreengrocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has verylittle power. The prime minister, naturally, has greater power, butin return he is far more deeply involved. Both, however, are unfree,each merely in a somewhat different way. The real accomplice inthis involvement, therefore, is not another person, but the systemitself.

Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of respon-sibility and guilt, but it gives no one unlimited responsibility andguilt, nor does it completely absolve anyone. Thus the conflict be-tween the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflictbetween two socially defined and separate communities; and onlya very generalized view (and even that only approximative) permitsus to divide society into the rulers and the ruled. Here, by theway, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this lineof conflict can still be drawn according to social class. In the post-totalitarian system, this line runs de facto through each person,for everyone in his own way is both a victim and a supporter of

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the system. What we understand by the system is not, therefore, asocial order imposed by one group upon another, but rather some-thing which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shapingit, something which may seem impossible to grasp or define (for itis in the nature of a mere principle), but which is expressed by theentire society as an important feature of its life.

The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, thisself-directed system through which they divest themselves of theirinnermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehen-sible misunderstanding of history,. nor is it history somehow goneoff its rails. Neither is it the product of some diabolical higher willwhich has decided, for reasons unknown, to torment a portion ofhumanity in this way. It can happen and did happen only becausethere is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency towardthe creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system. There isobviously something in human beings which responds to this sys-tem, something they reflect and accommodate, something withinthem which paralyzes every effort of their better selves to revolt.Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can becompelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of livingin this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity,but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system asits own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its owndegeneration, as a record of peoples own failure as individuals.

The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person.In everyone there is some longing for humanitys rightful dignity,for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of tran-scendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, eachperson is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to termswith living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to aprofane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarian-ism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anony-mous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river ofpseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between twoidentities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the verynotion of identity itself.

In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the posttotali-tarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical

17

encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is itnot true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and theeffortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection withthe general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sac-rifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritualand moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender highervalues when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civ-ilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indif-ference? And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptinessof life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature ofmodern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although inthe external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kindof warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?

VII

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocersnaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiatehimself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. Hebegins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And heeven finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with thosewhom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt thegreengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritualand breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more hissuppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concretesignificance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post asmanager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His paywill be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate.His childrens access to higher education will be threatened. Hissuperiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder abouthim. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will notdo so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pres-sure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured thegreengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute thegreengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demon-strate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to

18

which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sortare dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done,particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The execu-tors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greateror lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, asagents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.

Thus the power structure, through the agency of those whocarry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the sys-tem, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, throughits alienating presence n people, will punish him for his rebellion.It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defensedictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individualoffense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incompa-rably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he hasdisrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game.He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillarof the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apartwhat holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is liv-ing a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the systemand exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said thatthe emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked,something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, thegreengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone topeer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is pos-sible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitutethe system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace andpermeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which itcan co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyonewho steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in itsentirety.

This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confrontedwith reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as livinga lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective neededto expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative ap-pears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance andliving a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and theirall-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant

19

how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does notconsist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on thosepillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, thegreengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any phys-ical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyonditself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, be-cause of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. Inthe post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth hasmore than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to itsinherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is),or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has anunambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the systemis living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threatto it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed moreseverely than anything else.

In the post-totalitarian system, truth in the widest sense of theword has a very special import, one unknown in other contexts. Inthis system, truth plays a far greater (and, above all, a far different)role as a factor of power, or as an outright political force. How doesthe power of truth operate? How does truth as a factor of powerwork? How can its power—as power—be realized?

VIII

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there issomething in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is theirauthentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into thetexture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authenticaim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only againstthis background does living a lie make any sense: it exists becauseof that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in thehuman order, it is a response to nothing other than the humanpredisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies,therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims,of its hidden openness to truth.

The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of livingwithin the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the

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truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hid-den sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly in the truthgrows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it findsunderstanding. This is where the potential for communication ex-ists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the perspectiveof power, very dangerous. The complex ferment that takes placewithin it goes on in semidarkness, and by the time it finally sur-faces into the light of day as an assortment of shocking surprisesto the system, it is usually too late to cover them up in the usualfashion. Thus they create a situation in which the regime is con-founded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inap-propriate ways.

It seems that the primary breeding ground for what might, in thewidest possible sense of the word, be understood as an oppositionin the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The con-frontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be,of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from thattypical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, thisconfrontation does not take place on the level of real, institution-alized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instrumentsof power, but on a different level altogether: the level of humanconsciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effectiverange of this special power cannot be measured in terms of dis-ciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifthcolumn of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in hu-man beings repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights,for the realization of their real social and political interests. Itspower, therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable po-litical or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential,which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the of-ficial power structures of that society. Therefore this power doesnot.rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemyas it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lieand who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by theforce of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect theirposition, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriologicalweapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a singlecivilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not partici-

21

pate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influencefelt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movementsit gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, un-der what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict)in something visible: a real political act or event, a social move-ment, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside anapparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressibletransformation in the social and intellectual climate. And sinceall genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hiddenbeneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the prover-bial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is whythe regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventively, eventhe most modest attempts to live within the truth.

Why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his own country? Certainlynot because he represented a unit of real power, that is, not be-cause any of the regimes representatives felt he might unseat themand take their place in government. Solzhenitsyns expulsion wassomething else: a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful well-spring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transfor-mations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day pro-duce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences. Andso the posttotalitarian system behaved in a characteristic way: itdefended the integrity of the world of appearances in order to de-fend itself. For the crust presented by the life of lies is made ofstrange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society,it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaksthrough in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperoris naked!”—when a single person breaks the rules of the game,thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in an-other light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissueon the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.

When I speak of living within the truth, I naturally do not havein mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest ora letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means bywhich a person or a group revolts against manipulation: anythingfrom a letter by intellectuals to a workers strike, from a rock con-cert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farci-cal elections to making an open speech at some official congress,

22

or even a hunger strike, for instance. If the suppression of the aimsof life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifacetedmanipulation of all expressions of life, then, by the same token,every free expression of life indirectly threatens the posttotalitar-ian system politically, including forms of expression to which, inother social systems, no one would attribute any potential politicalsignificance, not to mention explosive power.

The Prague Spring is usually understood as a clash betweentwo groups on the level of real power: those who wanted to main-tain the system as it was and those who wanted to reform it. It isfrequently forgotten, however, that this encounter was merely thefinal act and the inevitable consequence of a long drama originallyplayed out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience ofsociety. And that somewhere at the beginning of this drama, therewere individuals who were willing to live within the truth, evenwhen things were at their worst. These people had no access toreal power, nor did they aspire to it. The sphere in which they wereliving the truth was not necessarily even that of political thought.They could equally have been poets, painters, musicians, or simplyordinary citizens who were able to maintain their human dignity.Today it is naturally difficult to pinpoint when and through whichhidden, winding channel a certain action or attitude influenced agiven milieu, and to trace the virus of truth as it slowly spreadthrough the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disin-tegrate. One thing, however, seems clear: the attempt at politicalreform was not the cause of societys reawakening, but rather thefinal outcome of that reawakening.

I think the present also can be better understood in the light ofthis experience. The confrontation between a thousand Chartistsand the post-totalitarian system would appear to be politically hope-less. This is true, of course, if we look at it through the traditionallens of the open political system, in which, quite naturally, everypolitical force is measured chiefly in terms of the positions it holdson the level of real power. Given that perspective, a mini-partylike the Charter would certainly not stand a chance. If, however,this confrontation is seen against the background of what we knowabout power in the post-totalitarian system, it appears in a funda-mentally different light. For the time being, it is impossible to say

23

with any precision what impact the appearance of Charter 77, itsexistence, and its work has had in the hidden sphere, and how theCharters attempt to rekindle civic self-awareness and confidence isregarded there. Whether, when, and how this investment will even-tually produce dividends in the form of specific political changes iseven less possible to predict. But that, of course, is all part of liv-ing within the truth. As an existential solution, it takes individualsback to the solid ground of their own identity; as politics, it throwsthem into a game of chance where the stakes are all or nothing.For this reason it is undertaken only by those for whom the formeris worth risking the latter, or who have come to the conclusion thatthere is no other way to conduct real politics in Czechoslovakia to-day. Which, by the way, is the same thing: this conclusion can bereached only by someone who is unwilling to sacrifice his own hu-man identity to politics, or rather, who does not believe in a politicsthat requires such a sacrifice.

The more thoroughly the posttotalitarian system frustrates anyrival alternative on the level of real power, as well as any form ofpolitics independent of the laws of its own automatism, the moredefinitively the center of gravity of any potential political threatshifts to the area of the existential and the pre-political: usuallywithout any conscious effort, living within the truth becomes theone natural point of departure for all activities that work againstthe automatism of the system. And even if such activities ul-timately grow beyond the area of living within the truth (whichmeans they are transformed into various parallel structures, move-ments, institutions, they begin to be regarded as political activity,they bring real pressure to bear on the official structures and be-gin in fact to have a certain influence on the level of real power),they always carry with them the specific hallmark of their origins.Therefore it seems to me that not even the so-called dissident move-ments can be properly understood without constantly bearing inmind this special background from which they emerge.

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IX

The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within alie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly pos-sesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things,as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seducedby the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in anamalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who hasno roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for any-thing higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized per-son. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is infact a projection of it into society.

Living within the truth, as humanitys revolt against an enforcedposition, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over onesown sense of responsibility. In other words, it is clearly a moralact, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principallybecause it is not self-serving: the risk may bring rewards in theform of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not. In thisregard, as I stated previously, it is an all-or-nothing gamble, andit is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on sucha course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bringrewards tomorrow, be it only in the form of general gratitude. (Bythe way, the representatives of power invariably come to terms withthose who live within the truth by persistently ascribing utilitarianmotivations to them—a lust for power or fame or wealth—and thusthey try, at least, to implicate them in their own world, the worldof general demoralization.)

If living within the truth in the post-totalitarian system becomesthe chief breeding ground for independent, alternative political ideas,then all considerations about the nature and future prospects ofthese ideas must necessarily reflect this moral dimension as a po-litical phenomenon. (And if the revolutionary Marxist belief aboutmorality as a product of the “superstructure” inhibits any of ourfriends from realizing the full significance of this dimension and, inone way or another, from including it in their view of the world, it isto their own detriment: an anxious fidelity to the postulates of thatworld view prevents them from properly understanding the mech-anisms of their own political influence, thus paradoxically making

25

them precisely what they, as Marxists, so often suspect others ofbeing—victims of “false consciousness.”) The very special politicalsignificance of morality in the post-totalitarian system is a phe-nomenon that is at the very least unusual in modern political his-tory, a phenomenon that might well have—as I shall soon attemptto show—far-reaching consequences.

X

Undeniably, the most important political event in Czechoslovakiaafter the advent of the Husk leadership in 1968 was the appearanceof Charter 77. The spiritual and intellectual climate surroundingits appearance, however, was not the product of any immediate po-litical event. That climate was created by the trial of some youngmusicians associated with a rock group called “The Plastic Peopleof the Universe.” Their trial was not a confrontation of two differ-ing political forces or conceptions, but two differing conceptionsof life. On the one hand, there was the sterile puritanism of theposttotalitarian establishment and, on the other hand, unknownyoung people who wanted no more than to be able to live withinthe truth, to play the music they enjoyed, to sing songs that wererelevant to their lives, and to live freely in dignity and partnership.These people had no past history of political activity. They werenot highly motivated members of the opposition with political am-bitions, nor were they former politicians expelled from the powerstructures. They had been given every opportunity to adapt to thestatus quo, to accept the principles of living within a lie and thusto enjoy life undisturbed by the authorities. Yet they decided on adifferent course. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it,their case had a very special impact on everyone who had not yetgiven up hope. Moreover, when the trial took place, a new moodhad begun to surface after the years of waiting, of apathy and ofskepticism toward various forms of resistance. People were “tiredof being tired”; they were fed up with the stagnation, the inactivity,barely hanging on in the hope that things might improve after all.In some ways the trial was the final straw. Many groups of differ-ing tendencies which until then had remained isolated from each

26

other, reluctant to cooperate, or which were committed to forms ofaction that made cooperation difficult, were suddenly struck withthe powerful realization that freedom is indivisible. Everyone un-derstood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was anattack on a most elementary and important thing, something thatin fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notionof living within the truth, on the real aims of life. The freedom toplay rock music was understood as a human freedom and thus asessentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical andpolitical reflection, the freedom to write, the freedom to express anddefend the various social and political interests of society. Peoplewere inspired to feel a genuine sense of solidarity with the youngmusicians and they came to realize that not standing up for thefreedom of others, regardless of how remote their means of creativ-ity or their attitude to life, meant surrendering ones own freedom.(There is no freedom without equality before the law, and there isno equality before the law without freedom; Charter 77 has giventhis ancient notion a new and characteristic dimension, which hasimmensely important implications for modern Czech history. WhatSlde?ek, the author of the book Sixty-eight, in a brilliant analysis,calls the “principle of exclusion,” lies at the root of all our present-day moral and political misery. This principle was born at the endof the Second World War in that strange collusion of democrats andcommunists and was subsequently developed further and further,right to the bitter end. For the first time in decades this principlehas been overcome, by Charter 77: all those united in the Charterhave, for the first time, become equal partners. Charter 77 is notmerely a coalition of communists and noncommunists—that wouldbe nothing historically new and, from the moral and political pointof view, nothing revolutionary—but it is a community that is a pri-ori open to anyone, and no one in it is a priori assigned an inferiorposition.) This was the climate, then, in which Charter 77 was cre-ated. Who could have foreseen that the prosecution of one or twoobscure rock groups would have such far-reaching consequences?

I think that the origins of Charter 77 illustrate very well whatI have already suggested above: that in the posttotalitarian sys-tem, the real background to the movements that gradually assumepolitical significance does not usually consist of overtly political

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events or confrontations between different forces or concepts thatare openly political. These movements for the most part originateelsewhere, in the far broader area of the “pre-political,” where liv-ing within a lie confronts living within the truth, that is, wherethe demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the realaims of life. These real aims can naturally assume a great manyforms. Sometimes they appear as the basic material or social interests of a group or an individual; at other times, they may appearas certain intellectual and spiritual interests; at still other times,they may be the most fundamental of existential demands, suchas the simple longing of people to live their own lives in dignity.Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because ofthe elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heardbut simply because, given the complex system of manipulation onwhich the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it isalso dependent, every free human act or expression, every attemptto live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to thesystem and, thus, as something which is political par excellence.Any eventual political articulation of the movements that grow outof this “pre-political” hinterland is secondary. It develops and ma-tures as a result of a subsequent confrontation with the system,and not because it started off as a political program, project, orimpulse.

Once again, the events of 1968 confirm this. The communistpoliticians who were trying to reform the system came forward withtheir program not because they had suddenly experienced a mys-tical enlightenment, but because they were led to do so by contin-ued and increasing pressure from areas of life that had nothing todo with politics in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, theywere trying in political ways to solve the social conflicts (which infact were confrontations between the aims of the system and theaims of life) that almost every level of society had been experiencingdaily, and had been thinking about with increasing openness foryears. Backed by this living resonance throughout society, schol-ars and artists had defined the problem in a wide variety of waysand students were demanding solutions.

The genesis of Charter 77 also illustrates the special politicalsignificance of the moral aspect of things that I have mentioned.

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Charter 77 would have been unimaginable without that power-ful sense of solidarity among widely differing groups, and withoutthe sudden realization that it was impossible to go on waiting anylonger, and that the truth had to be spoken loudly and collectively,regardless of the virtual certainty of sanctions and the uncertaintyof any tangible results in the immediate future. “There are somethings worth suffering for,” Jan Pato?ka wrote shortly before hisdeath. I think that Chartists understand this not only as Pato?kaslegacy, but also as the best explanation of why they do what theydo.

Seen from the outside, and chiefly from the vantage point of thesystem and its power structure, Charter 77 came as a surprise, asa bolt out of the blue. It was not a bolt out of the blue, of course,but that impression is understandable, since the ferment that ledto it took place in the “hidden sphere,” in that semidarkness wherethings are difficult to chart or analyze. The chances of predictingthe appearance of the Charter were just as slight as the chances arenow of predicting where it will lead. Once again, it was that shock,so typical of moments when something from the hidden spheresuddenly bursts through the moribund surface of living within alie. The more one is trapped in the world of appearances, the moresurprising it is when something like that happens.

XI

In societies under the post-totalitarian system, all political life inthe traditional sense has been eliminated. People have no oppor-tunity to express themselves politically in public, let alone to orga-nize politically. The gap that results is filled by ideological ritual.In such a situation, peoples interest in political matters naturallydwindles and independent political thought, insofar as it exists atall, is seen by the majority as unrealistic, farfetched, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns;something admirable, perhaps, but quite pointless, because it is onthe one hand entirely utopian and on the other hand extraordinar-ily dangerous, in view of the unusual vigor with which any move inthat direction is persecuted by the regime.

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Yet even in such societies, individuals and groups of people existwho do not abandon politics as a vocation and who, in one way oranother, strive to think independently, to express themselves andin some cases even to organize politically, because that is a part oftheir attempt to live within the truth.

The fact that these people exist and work is in itself immenselyimportant and worthwhile. Even in the worst of times, they main-tain the continuity of political thought. If some genuine politicalimpulse emerges from this or that “pre-political” confrontation andis properly articulated early enough, thus increasing its chancesof relative success, then this is frequently due to these isolatedgenerals without an army who, because they have maintained thecontinuity of political thought in the face of enormous difficulties,can at the right moment enrich the new impulse with the fruits oftheir own political thinking. Once again, there is ample evidencefor this process in Czechoslovakia. Almost all those who were po-litical prisoners in the early 1970s, who had apparently been madeto suffer in vain because of their quixotic efforts to work politi-cally among an utterly apathetic and demoralized society, belongtoday—inevitably—among the most active Chartists. In Charter 77,the moral legacy of their earlier sacrifices is valued, and they haveenriched this movement with their experience and that element ofpolitical thinking.

And yet it seems to me that the thought and activity of thosefriends who have never given up direct political work and who arealways ready to assume direct political responsibility very oftensuffer from one chronic fault: an insufficient understanding of thehistorical uniqueness of the posttotalitarian system as a social andpolitical reality. They have little understanding of the specific na-ture of power that is typical for this system and therefore they over-estimate the importance of direct political work in the traditionalsense. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the political significanceof those “pre-political” events and processes that provide the livinghumus from which genuine political change usually springs. Aspolitical actors—or, rather, as people with political ambitions—theyfrequently try to pick up where natural political life left off. Theymaintain models of behavior that may have been appropriate inmore normal political circumstances and thus, without really be-

30

ing aware of it, they bring an outmoded way of thinking, old habits,conceptions, categories, and notions to bear on circumstances thatare quite new and radically different, without first giving adequatethought to the meaning and substance of such things in the newcircumstances, to what politics as such means now, to what sortof thing can have political impact and potential, and in what way-Because such people have been excluded from the structures ofpower and are no longer able to influence those structures directly(and because they remain faithful to traditional notions of poli-tics established in more or less democratic societies or in classicaldictatorships) they frequently, in a sense, lose touch with reality.Why make compromises with reality, they say, when none of ourproposals will ever be accepted anyway? Thus they find themselvesin a world of genuinely utopian thinking.

As I have already tried to indicate, however, genuinely far-reachingpolitical events do not emerge from the same sources and in thesame way in the post-totalitarian system as they do in a democ-racy. And if a large portion of the public is indifferent to, evenskeptical of, alternative political models and programs and the pri-vate establishment of opposition political parties, this is not merelybecause there is a general feeling of apathy toward public affairsand a loss of that sense of higher responsibility; in other words, itis not just a consequence of the general demoralization. There isalso a bit of healthy social instinct at work in this attitude. It isas if people sensed intuitively that “nothing is what it seems anylonger,” as the saying goes, and that from now on, therefore, thingsmust be done entirely differently as well.

If some of the most important political impulses in Soviet bloccountries in recent years have come initially—that is, before beingfelt on the level of actual power—from mathematicians, philoso-phers, physicians, writers, historians, ordinary workers, and soon, more frequently than from politicians, and if the driving forcebehind the various dissident movements comes from so many peo-ple in nonpolitical professions, this is not because these people aremore clever than those who see themselves primarily as politicians.It is because those who are not politicians are also not so boundby traditional political thinking and political habits and therefore,paradoxically, they are more aware of genuine political reality and

31

more sensitive to what can and should be done under the circum-stances.

There is no way around it: no matter how beautiful an alterna-tive political model can be, it can no longer speak to the “hiddensphere,” inspire people and society, call for real political ferment.The real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian systemis elsewhere: in the continuing and cruel tension between the com-plex demands of that system and the aims of life, that is, the ele-mentary need of human beings to live, to a certain extent at least,in harmony with themselves, that is, to live in a bearable way, notto be humiliated by their superiors and officials, not to be continu-ally watched by the police, to be able to express themselves freely,to find an outlet for their creativity, to enjoy legal security, andso on. Anything that touches this field concretely, anything thatrelates to this fundamental, omnipresent, and living tension, willinevitably speak to people. Abstract projects for an ideal politicalor economic order do not interest them to anything like the sameextent—and rightly so—not only because everyone knows how littlechance they have of succeeding, but also because today people feelthat the less political policies are derived from a concrete and hu-man here and now and the more they fix their sights on an abstract“someday,” the more easily they can degenerate into new forms ofhuman enslavement. People who live in the posttotalitarian systemknow only too well that the question of whether one or several po-litical parties are in power, and how these parties define and labelthemselves, is of far less importance than the question of whetheror not it is possible to live like a human being.

To shed the burden of traditional political categories and habitsand open oneself up fully to the world of human existence and thento draw political conclusions only after having analyzed it: this isnot only politically more realistic but at the same time, from thepoint of view of an “ideal state of affairs,” politically more promisingas well. A genuine, profound, and lasting change for the better—asI shall attempt to show—can no longer result from the victory (weresuch a victory possible) of any particular traditional political con-ception, which can ultimately be only external, that is, a structuralor systemic conception. More than ever before, such a change willhave to derive from human existence, from the fundamental recon-

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stitution of the position of people in the world, their relationshipsto themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a bettereconomic and political model is to be created, then perhaps morethan ever before it must derive from profound existential and moralchanges in society. This is not something that can be designed andintroduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new varia-tion of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression oflife in the process of transforming itself. A better system will notautomatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: onlyby creating a better life can a better system be developed.

Once more I repeat that I am not underestimating the impor-tance oF political thought and conceptual political work. On thecontrary, I think that genuine political thought and genuinely po-litical work is precisely what we continually fail to achieve. If Isay “genuine,” however, I have in mind the kind oF thought andconceptual work that has freed itself of all the traditional politicalschemata that have been imported into our circumstances from aworld that will never return (and whose return, even were it pos-sible, would provide no permanent solution to the most importantproblems).

The Second and Fourth Internationals, like many other politicalpowers and organizations, may naturally provide significant politi-cal support for various efforts of ours, but neither of them can solveour problems for us. They operate in a different world and are aproduct of different circumstances. Their theoretical concepts canbe interesting and instructive to us, but one thing is certain: wecannot solve our problems simply by identifying with these organi-zations. And the attempt in our country to place what we do in thecontext of some of the discussions that dominate political life indemocratic societies often seems like sheer folly. For example, is itpossible to talk seriously about whether we want to change the sys-tem or merely reform it? In the circumstances under which we live,this is a pseudo-problem, since for the time being there is simplyno way we can accomplish either goal. We are not even clear aboutwhere reform ends and change begins. We know from a numberof harsh experiences that neither reform nor change is in itself aguarantee of anything. We know that ultimately it is all the sameto us whether or not the system in which we live, in the light of a

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particular doctrine, appears changed or reformed. Our concern iswhether we can live with dignity in such a system, whether it servespeople rather than people serving it. We are struggling to achievethis with the means available to us, and the means it makes senseto employ. Western journalists, submerged in the political banali-ties in which they live, may label our approach as overly legalistic,as too risky, revisionist, counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, commu-nist, or as too right-wing or left-wing. But this is the very last thingthat interests us. XII One concept that is a constant source of con-fusion chiefly because it has been imported into our circumstancesfrom circumstances that are entirely different is the concept of anopposition. What exactly is an opposition in the posttotalitariansystem?

In democratic societies with a traditional parliamentary systemof government, political opposition is understood as a political forceon the level of actual power (most frequently a party or coalition ofparties) which is not a part of the government. It offers an al-ternative political program, it has ambitions to govern, and it isrecognized and respected by the government in power as a naturalelement in the political life of the country. It seeks to spread itsinfluence by political means, and competes for power on the basisof agreed-upon legal regulations.

In addition to this form of opposition, there exists the phe-nomenon of the “extra-parliamentary opposition,” which again con-sists of forces organized more or less on the level of actual power,but which operate outside the rules created by the system, andwhich employ different means than are usual within that frame-work.

In classical dictatorships, the term “opposition” is understoodto mean the political forces which have also come out with an al-ternative political program. They operate either legally or on theouter limits of legality, but in any case they cannot compete forpower within the limits of some agreed-upon regulations. Or theterm “opposition” may be applied to forces preparing for a violentconfrontation with the ruling power, or who feel themselves to be inthis state of confrontation already, such as various guerrilla groupsor liberation movements.

An opposition in the post-totalitarian system does not exist in

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any of these senses. In what way, then, can the term be used?

1. Occasionally the term “opposition” is applied, mainly by West-ern journalists, to persons or groups inside the power struc-ture who find themselves in a state of hidden conflict withthe highest authorities. The reasons for this conflict may becertain differences (not very sharp differences, naturally) of aconceptual nature, but more frequently it is quite simply alonging for power or a personal antipathy to others who rep-resent that power.

2. Opposition here can also be understood as everything thatdoes or can have an indirect political effect in the sense al-ready mentioned, that is, everything the post-totalitarian sys-tem feels threatened by, which in fact means everything it isthreatened by. In this sense, the opposition is every attemptto live within the truth, from the greengrocers refusal to putthe slogan in his window to a freely written poem; in otherwords, everything in which the genuine aims of life go beyondthe limits placed on them by the aims of the system.

3. More frequently, however, the opposition is usually under-stood (again, largely by Western journalists) as groups of peo-ple who make public their nonconformist stances and criticalopinions, who make no secret of their independent thinkingand who, to a greater or lesser degree, consider themselvesa political force. In this sense, the notion of an oppositionmore or less overlaps with the notion of dissent, although, ofcourse, there are great differences in the degree to which thatlabel is accepted or rejected. It depends not only on the extentto which these people understand their power as a directly po-litical force, and on whether they have ambitions to participatein actual power, but also on how each of them understandsthe notion of an opposition.

Again, here is an example: in its original declaration, Charter77 emphasized that it was not an opposition because it had nointention of presenting an alternative political program. It seesits mission as something quite different, for it has not presented

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such programs. In fact, if the presenting of an alternative programdefines the nature of an opposition in post-totalitarian states, thenthe Charter cannot be considered an opposition.

The Czechoslovak government, however, has considered Char-ter 77 as an expressly oppositional association from the very begin-ning, and has treated it accordingly. This means that the government—and this is only natural—understands the term “opposition” moreor less as I defined it in point z, that is, as everything that man-ages to avoid total manipulation and which therefore denies theprinciple that the system has an absolute claim on the individual.

If we accept this definition of opposition, then of course wemust, along with the government, consider the Charter a gen-uine opposition, because it represents a serious challenge to theintegrity of post-totalitarian power, founded as it is on the univer-sality of living with a lie.

It is a different matter, however, when we look at the extentto which individual signatories of Charter 77 think of themselvesas an opposition. My impression is that most base their under-standing of the term “opposition” on the traditional meaning of theword as it became established in democratic societies (or in clas-sical dictatorships); therefore, they understand opposition, evenin Czechoslovakia, as a politically defined force which, although itdoes not operate on the level of actual power, and even less withinthe framework of certain rules respected by the government, wouldstill not reject the opportunity to participate in actual power be-cause it has, in a sense, an alternative political program whoseproponents are prepared to accept direct political responsibility forit. Given this notion of an opposition, some Chartists—the greatmajority—do not see themselves in this way. Others—a minority—do, even though they fully respect the fact that there is no roomwithin Charter 77 for “oppositional” activity in this sense. At thesame time, however, perhaps every Chartist is familiar enough withthe specific nature of conditions in the post-totalitarian system torealize that it is not only the struggle for human rights that has itsown peculiar political power, but incomparably more “innocent” ac-tivities as well, and therefore they can be understood as an aspectof opposition. No Chartist can really object to being considered anopposition in this sense.

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There is another circumstance, however, that considerably com-plicates matters. For many decades, the power ruling society in theSoviet bloc has used the label “opposition” as the blackest of indict-ments, as synonymous with the word “enemy.” To brand someone“a member of the opposition” is tantamount to saying he is tryingto overthrow the government and put an end to socialism (natu-rally in the pay of the imperialists). There have been times whenthis label led straight to the gallows, and of course this does notencourage people to apply the same label to themselves. Moreover,it is only a word, and what is actually done is more important thanhow it is labeled.

The final reason why many reject such a term is because thereis something negative about the notion of an “opposition.” Peoplewho so define themselves do so in relation to a prior “position.” Inother words, they relate themselves specifically to the power thatrules society and through it, define themselves, deriving their ownposition from the position of the regime. For people who have sim-ply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they think,to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to create asthey want and simply to live in harmony with their better self, it isnaturally disagreeable to feel required to define their own originaland positive position negatively, in terms of something else, and tothink of themselves primarily as people who are against something,not simply as people who are what they are.

Obviously, the only way to avoid misunderstanding is to sayclearly—before one starts using them—in what sense the terms“opposition” and “member of the opposition” are being used andhow they are in fact to be understood in our circumstances.

XIII

If the term “opposition” has been imported from democratic soci-eties into the post-totalitarian system without general agreementon what the word means in conditions that are so different, thenthe term “dissident” was, on the contrary, chosen by Western jour-nalists and is now generally accepted as the label for a phenomenonpeculiar to the posttotalitarian system and almost never occurring—

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at least not in that form—in democratic societies.Who are these “dissidents”?It seems that the term is applied primarily to citizens of the

Soviet bloc who have decided to live within the truth and who, inaddition, meet the following criteria:

1. They express their nonconformist positions and critical opin-ions publicly and systematically, within the very strict limitsavailable to them, and because of this, they are known in theWest.

2. Despite being unable to publish at home and despite everypossible form of persecution by their governments, they have,by virtue of their attitudes, managed to win a certain esteem,both from the public and from their government, and thusthey actually enjoy a very limited and very strange degree ofindirect, actual power in their own milieu as well. This eitherprotects them from the worst forms of persecution, or at leastit ensures that if they are persecuted, it will mean certainpolitical complications for their governments.

3. The horizon of their critical attention and their commiG mentreaches beyond the narrow context of their immediate sur-roundings or special interests to embrace more general causesand, thus, their work becomes political in nature, althoughthe degree to which they think of themselves as a directly po-litical force may vary a great deal.

4. They are people who lean toward intellectual pursuits, that is,they are “writing” people, people for whom the written word isthe primary—and often the only—political medium they com-mand, and that can gain them attention, particularly fromabroad. Other ways in which they seek to live within the truthare either lost to the foreign observer in the elusive local milieuor—if they reach beyond this local framework—they appear tobe only somewhat less visible complements to what they havewritten.

5. Regardless of their actual vocations, these people are talkedabout in the West more frequently in terms of their activities

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as committed citizens, or in terms of the critical, political as-pects of their work, than in terms of the real work they doin their own fields. From personal experience, I know thatthere is an invisible line you cross—without even wanting toor becoming aware of it—beyond which they cease to treat youas a writer who happens to be a concerned citizen and begintalking of you as a “dissident” who almost incidentally (in hisspare time, perhaps?) happens to write plays as well.

Unquestionably, there are people who meet all of these criteria.What is debatable is whether we should be using a special term fora group defined in such an essentially accidental way, and specif-ically, whether they should be called “dissidents.” It does happen,however, and there is clearly nothing we can do about it. Some-times, to facilitate communication, we even use the label ourselves,although it is done with distaste, rather ironically, and almost al-ways in quotation marks.

Perhaps it is now appropriate to outline some of the reasonswhy “dissidents” themselves are not very happy to be referred to inthis way. In the first place, the word is problematic from an etymo-logical point of view. A “dissident,” we are told in our press, meanssomething like “renegade” or “backslider.” But dissidents do notconsider themselves renegades for the simple reason that they arenot primarily denying or rejecting anything. On the contrary, theyhave tried to affirm their own human identity, and if they rejectanything at all, then it is merely what was false and alienating intheir lives, that aspect of living within a lie.

But that is not the most important thing. The term “dissident”frequently implies a special profession, as if, along with the morenormal vocations, there were another special one grumbling aboutthe state of things. In fact, a “dissident” is simply a physicist, asociologist, a worker, a poet, individuals who are doing what theyfeel they must and, consequently, who find themselves in openconflict with the regime. This conflict has not come about throughany conscious intention on their part, but simply through the innerlogic of their thinking, behavior, or work (often confronted withexternal circumstances more or less beyond their control). Theyhave not, in other words, consciously decided to be professional

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malcontents, rather as one decides to be a tailor or a blacksmith.In fact, of course, they do not usually discover they are “dissi-

dents” until long after they have actually become one. “Dissent”springs from motivations far different from the desire for titles orfame. In short, they do not decide to become “dissidents,” and evenif they were to devote twenty-four hours a day to it, it would stillnot be a profession, but primarily an existential attitude. Moreover,it is an attitude that is in no way the exclusive property of thosewho have earned themselves the title of “dissident” just becausethey happen to fulfill those accidental external conditions alreadymentioned. There are thousands of nameless people who try tolive within the truth and millions who want to but cannot, perhapsonly because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, theywould need ten times the courage of those who have already takenthe first step. If several dozen are randomly chosen from amongall these people and put into a special category, this can utterlydistort the general picture. It does so in two different ways. Ei-ther it suggests that “dissidents” are a group of prominent people,a protected species who are permitted to do things others are notand whom the government may even be cultivating as living proofof its generosity; or it lends support to the illusion that since thereis no more than a handful of malcontents to whom not very muchis really being done, all the rest are therefore content, for were theynot so, they would be “dissidents” too.

But that is not all. This categorization also unintentionally sup-ports the impression that the primary concern of these “dissidents”is some vested interest that they share as a group, as thoughtheir entire argument with the government were no more than arather abstruse conflict between two opposed groups, a conflictthat leaves society out of it altogether. But such an impressionprofoundly contradicts the real importance of the “dissident” atti-tude, which stands or falls on its interest in others, in what ailssociety as a whole, in other words, on an interest in all those whodo not speak up. If “dissidents” have any kind of authority at all,and if they have not been exterminated long ago like exotic insectsthat have appeared where they have no business being, then thisis not because the government holds this exclusive group and theirexclusive ideas in such awe, but because it is perfectly aware of the

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potential political power of living within the truth rooted in the hid-den sphere, and well aware too of the kind of world “dissent” growsout of and the world it addresses: the everyday human world, theworld of daily tension between the aims of life and the aims of thesystem. (Can there be any better evidence of this than the govern-ments action after Charter 77 appeared, when it launched a cam-paign to compel the entire nation to declare that Charter q waswrong? Those millions of signatures proved, among other things,that just the opposite was true.) The political organs and the po-lice do not lavish such enormous attention on “dissidents”—whichmay give the impression that the government fears them as theymight fear an alternative power clique—because they actually aresuch a power clique, but because they are ordinary people withordinary cares, differing from the rest only in that they say aloudwhat the rest cannot say or are afraid to say. I have already men-tioned Solzhenitsyns political influence: it does not reside in someexclusive political power he possesses as an individual, but in theexperience of those millions of Gulag victims which he simply am-plified and communicated to millions of other people of good will.

To institutionalize a select category of well-known or prominent“dissidents” means in fact to deny the most intrinsic moral aspectof their activity. As we have seen, the “dissident” movement growsout of the principle of equality, founded on the notion that humanrights and freedoms are indivisible. After all, did no well-known“dissidents” unite in KOR to defend unknown workers? And wasit not precisely for this reason that they became “well-known dissi-dents”? And did not the well-known “dissidents” unite in Charter77 after they had been brought together in defense of those un-known musicians, and did they not unite in the Charter preciselywith them, and did they not become “well-known dissidents” pre-cisely because of that? It is truly a cruel paradox that the moresome citizens stand up in defense of other citizens, the more theyare labeled with a word that in effect separates them from those“other citizens.”

This explanation, I hope, will make clear the significance of thequotation marks I have put around the word “dissident” through-out this essay.

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XIV

AT the time when the Czech lands and Slovakia were an integralpart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when there existed nei-ther the historical nor the political, psychological, nor social con-ditions that would have enabled the Czechs and Slovaks to seektheir identity outside the framework of this empire, Tom? GarrigueMasaryk established a Czechoslovak national program based onthe notion of “small-scale work” (dro6nc prce). By that he meanthonest and responsible work in widely different areas of life butwithin the existing social order, work that would stimulate nationalcreativity and national self-confidence. Naturally he placed partic-ular emphasis on intelligent and enlightened upbringing and edu-cation, and on the moral and humanitarian aspects of life. Masarykbelieved that the only possible starting point for a more dignifiednational destiny was humanity itself. Humanitys first task was tocreate the conditions for a more human life; and in Masaryks view,the task of transforming the stature of the nation began with thetransformation of human beings.

This notion of “working for the good of the nation” took root inCzechoslovak society and in many ways it was successful and isstill alive today. Along with those who exploit the notion as a so-phisticated excuse for collaborating with the regime, there are stillmany, even today, who genuinely uphold the ideal and, in some ar-eas at least, can point to indisputable achievements. It is hard tosay how much worse things would be if there were not many hard-working people who simply refuse to give up and try constantly todo the best they can, paying an unavoidable minimum to livingwithin a lie so that they might give their utmost to the authenticneeds of society. These people assume, correctly, that every pieceof good work is an indirect criticism of bad politics, and that therere situations where it is worthwhile going this route, even thoughit means surrendering ones natural right to make direct criticisms.

Today, however, there are very clear limitations to this attitude,even compared to the situation in the 1960s. More and more fre-quently, those who attempt to practice the principle of “small-scalework” come up against the post-totalitarian system and find them-selves facing a dilemma: either one retreats from that position,

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dilutes the honesty, responsibility, and consistency on which it isbased, and simply adapts to circumstances (the approach takenby the majority), or one continues on the way begun and inevitablycomes into conflict with the regime (the approach taken by a mi-nority).

If the notion of small-scale work was never intended as an im-perative to survive in the existing social and political structure atany cost (in which case individuals who allowed themselves to beexcluded from that structure would necessarily appear to havegiven up “working for the nation”), then today it is even less sig-nificant. There is no general model of behavior, that is, no neat,universally valid way of determining the point at which small-scalework ceases to be for the good of the nation and becomes detrimen-tal to the nation. It is more than clear, however, that the danger ofsuch a reversal is becoming more and more acute and that small-scale work, with increasing frequency, is coming up against thatlimit beyond which avoiding conflict means compromising its veryessence.

In 1974, when I was employed in a brewery, my immediate su-perior was a certain ?, a person well versed in the art of makingbeer. He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery tobrew good beer. He spent almost all his time at work, continuallythinking up improvements, and he frequently made the rest of usfeel uncomfortable because he assumed that we loved brewing asmuch as he did. In the midst of the slovenly indifference to workthat socialism encourages, a more constructive worker would bedifficult to imagine.

The brewery itself was managed by people who understood theirwork less and were less fond of it, but who were politically moreinfluential. They were bringing the brewery to ruin and not onlydid they fail to react to any of ?s suggestions, but they actuallybecame increasingly hostile toward him and tried in every way tothwart his efforts to do a good job. Eventually the situation be-came so bad that S felt compelled to write a lengthy letter to themanagers superior, in which he attempted to analyze the brewerysdifficulties. He explained why it was the worst in the district andpointed to those responsible.

His voice might have been heard. The manager, who was polit-

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ically powerful but otherwise ignorant of beer, a man who loathedworkers and was given to intrigue, might have been replaced andconditions in the brewery might have been improved on the basisof ?s suggestions. Had this happened, it would have been a perfectexample of small-scale work in action. Unfortunately, the preciseopposite occurred: the manager of the brewery, who was a memberof the Communist Party’s district committee, had friends in higherplaces and he saw to it that the situation was resolved in his fa-vor. ?s analysis was described as a “defamatory document” and Shimself was labeled a “political saboteur.” He was thrown out ofthe brewery and shifted to another one where he was given a jobrequiring no skill. Here the notion of small-scale work had comeup against the wall of the post-totalitarian system. By speakingthe truth, ? had stepped out of line, broken the rules, cast himselfout, and he ended up as a subcitizen, stigmatized as an enemy. Hecould now say anything he wanted, but he could never, as a matterof principle, expect to be heard. He had become the “dissident” ofthe Eastern Bohemian Brewery.

I think this is a model case which, from another point of view,illustrates what I have already said in the preceding section: youdo. not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day totake up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by yourpersonal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set ofexternal circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structuresand placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as anattempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded anenemy of society. This is why our situation is not comparable tothe Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Czech nation, in the worstperiod of Bachs absolutism, had only one real “dissident,” KarelHavl?ek, who was imprisoned in Brixen. Today, if we are not to besnobbish about it, we must admit that “dissidents” can be foundon every street corner.

To rebuke “dissidents” for having abandoned “small-scale work”is simply absurd. “Dissent” is not an alternative to Masaryks no-tion, it is frequently its one possible outcome. I say “frequently” inorder to emphasize that this is not always the case. I am far frombelieving that the only decent and responsible people are those whofind themselves at odds with the existing social and political struc-

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tures. After all, the brewmasters might have won his battle. Tocondemn those who have kept their positions simply because theyhave kept them, in other words, for not being “dissidents,” wouldbe just as absurd as to hold them up as an example to the “dis-sidents.” In any case, it contradicts the whole “dissident” attitudeseen as an attempt to live within the truth—if one judges humanbehavior not according to what it is and whether it is good or not,but according to the personal circumstances such an attempt hasbrought one to.

XV

Our greengrocers attempt to live within the truth may be confinedto not doing certain things. He decides not to put flags in his win-dow when his only motive for putting them there in the first placewould have been to avoid being reported by the house warden;he does not vote in elections that he considers false; he does nothide his opinions from his superiors. In other words, he may gono further than “merely” refusing to comply with certain demandsmade on him by the system (which of course is not an insignifi-cant step to take). This may, however, grow into something more.The greengrocer may begin to do something concrete, somethingthat goes beyond an immediately personal self-defensive reactionagainst manipulation, something that will manifest his newfoundsense of higher responsibility. He may, for example, organize hisfellow greengrocers to act together in defense of their interests. Hemay write letters to various institutions, drawing their attention toinstances of disorder and injustice around him. He may seek outunofficial literature, copy it, and lend it to his friends.

If what I have called living within the truth is a basic existential(and of course potentially political) starting point for all those “inde-pendent citizens initiatives” and “dissident” or “opposition” move-ments this does not mean that every attempt to live within thetruth automatically belongs in this category. On the contrary, inits most original and broadest sense, living within the truth coversa vast territory whose outer limits are vague and difficult to map,a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast

45

majority of which will remain anonymous and whose political im-pact will probably never be felt or described any more concretelythan simply as a part of a social climate or mood. Most of theseexpressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: yousimply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as anindividual.

Here and there—thanks to the nature, the assumptions, andthe professions of some people, but also thanks to a number ofaccidental circumstances such as the specific nature of the localmilieu, friends, and so on—a more coherent and visible initiativemay emerge from this wide and anonymous hinterland, an initia-tive that transcends “merely” individual revolt and is transformedinto more conscious, structured, and purposeful work. The pointwhere living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of livingwith a lie and becomes articulate in a particular way is the pointat which something is born that might be called the “independentspiritual, social, and political life of society.” This independent lifeis not separated from the rest of life (“dependent life”) by somesharply defined line. Both types frequently co-exist in the samepeople. Nevertheless, its most important focus is marked by a rel-atively high degree of inner emancipation. It sails upon the vastocean of the manipulated life like little boats, tossed by the wavesbut always bobbing back as visible messengers of living within thetruth, articulating the suppressed aims of life.

What is this independent life of society? The spectrum of itsexpressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes every-thing from self education and thinking about the world, throughfree creative activity and its communication to others, to the mostvaried free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent so-cial self-organization. In short, it is an area in which living withinthe truth becomes articulate and materializes in a visible way.

Thus what will later be referred to as “citizens initiatives,” “dis-sident movements,” or even “oppositions,” emerge, like the prover-bial one tenth of the iceberg visible above the water, from that area,from the independent life of society. In other words, just as the in-dependent life of society develops out of living within the truth inthe widest sense of the word, as the distinct, articulated expressionof that life, so “dissent” gradually emerges from the independent

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life of society. Yet there is a marked difference: if the independentlife of society, externally at least, can be understood as a higherform of living within the truth, it is far less certain that “dissident”movements are necessarily a higher form of the independent lifeof society. They are simply one manifestation of it and, thoughthey may be the most visible and, at first glance, the most politi-cal (and most clearly articulated) expression of it, they are far fromnecessarily being the most mature or even the most important, notonly in the general social sense but even in terms of direct politi-cal influence. After all, “dissent” has been artificially removed fromits place of birth by having been given a special name. In fact,however, it is not possible to think of it separated from the wholebackground out of which it develops, of which it is an integral part,and from which it draws all its vital strength. In any case, it fol-lows from what has already been said about the peculiarities of thepost-totalitarian system that what appears to be the most politi-cal of forces in a given moment, and what thinks of itself in suchterms, need not necessarily in fact be such a force. The extent towhich it is a real political force is due exclusively to its pre-politicalcontext.

What follows from this description? Nothing more and nothingless than this: it is impossible to talk about what in fact “dissi-dents” do and the effect of their work without first talking aboutthe work of all those who, in one way or an other, take part in theindependent life of society and who are not necessarily “dissidents”at all. They may be writers who write as they wish without regardfor censorship or official demands and who issue their work—whenofficial publishers refuse to print it—as samizdat. They may bephilosophers, historians, sociologists, and all those who practiceindependent scholarship and, if it is impossible through official orsemi-official channels, who also circulate their work in samizdator who organize private discussions, lectures, and seminars. Theymay be teachers who privately teach young people things that arekept from them in the state schools; clergymen who either in officeor, if they are deprived of their charges, outside it, try to carry ona free religious life; painters, musicians, and singers who practicetheir work regardless of how it is looked upon by official institu-tions; everyone who shares this independent culture and helps to

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spread it; people who, using the means available to them, try toexpress and defend the actual social interests of workers, to putreal meaning back into trade unions or to form independent ones;people who are not afraid to call the attention of officials to cases ofinjustice and who strive to see that the laws are observed; and thedifferent groups of young people who try to extricate themselvesfrom manipulation and live in their own way, in the spirit of theirown hierarchy of values. The list could go on.

Very few would think of calling all these people “dissidents.” Andyet are not the well-known “dissidents” simply people like them?Are not all these activities in fact what “dissidents” do as well? Dothey not produce scholarly work and publish it in samizdat? Dothey not write plays and novels and poems? Do they not lectureto students in private “universities”? Do they not struggle againstvarious forms of injustice and attempt to ascertain and express thegenuine social interests of various sectors of the population?

After having tried to indicate the sources, the inner structure,and some aspects of the “dissident” attitude as such, I have clearlyshifted my viewpoint from outside, as it were, to an investigation ofwhat these “dissidents” actually do, how their initiatives are mani-fested, and where they lead.

The first conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the original andmost important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all theothers, is simply an attempt to create and support the independentlife of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth.In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and artic-ulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all:if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for everyattempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of thesystem, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent actof political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsicexistential source of the “dissident” attitude, then it is difficult toimagine that even manifest “dissent” could have any other basisthan the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to makeroom for the genuine aims of life.

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XVI

The post-totalitarian system is mounting a total assault on humansand humans stand against it alone, abandoned and isolated. It istherefore entirely natural that all the “dissident” movements areexplicitly defensive movements: they exist to defend human beingsand the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system.

Today the Polish group KOR is called the “Committee for SocialSelf-Defense: The word “defense” appears in the names of othersimilar groups in Poland, but even the Soviet Helsinki monitoringgroup and our own Charter 77 are clearly defensive in nature.

In terms of traditional politics, this program of defense is un-derstandable, even though it may appear minimal, provisional, andultimately negative. It offers no new conception, model, or ideol-ogy, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of the word,since politics always assumes a positive program and can scarcelylimit itself to defending someone against something.

Such a view, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionallypolitical way of looking at things. The post-totalitarian system, af-ter all, is not the manifestation of a particular political line followedby a particular government. It is something radically different: it isa complex, profound, and long-term violation of society, or ratherthe self violation of society. To oppose it merely by establishing adifferent political line and then striving for a change in governmentwould not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, forit would never come near to touching the root of the matter. Forsome time now, the problem has no longer resided in a politicalline or program: it is a problem of life itself.

Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity, is notonly a more realistic approach, since it can begin right now andis potentially more popular because it concerns peoples everydaylives; at the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this) it isalso an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims atthe very essence of things.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our miseryto understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of awell to see the stars in broad daylight. It seems to me that today,this “provisional,” “minimal,” and “negative” program—the “simple”

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defense of people—is in a particular sense (and not merely in thecircumstances in which we live) an optimal and most positive pro-gram because it forces politics to return to its only proper startingpoint, proper that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: indi-vidual people. In the democratic societies, where the violence doneto human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this funda-mental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some thingswill probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for thatrevolution is reflected in politics. In our world, precisely because ofthe misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politicshas already undergone that transformation: the central concern ofpolitical thought is no longer abstract visions of a self-redeeming,“positive” model (and of course the opportunistic political practicesthat are the reverse of the same coin), but rather the people whohave so far merely been enslaved by those models and their prac-tices.

Every society, of course, requires some degree of organization.Yet if that organization is to serve people, and not the other wayaround, then people will have to be liberated and space createdso that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways. Thedepravity of the opposite approach, in which people are first orga-nized in one way or another (by someone who always knows best“what the people need”) so they may then allegedly be liberated, issomething we have known on our own skins only too well.

To sum up: most people who are too bound to the traditional po-litical way of thinking see the weaknesses of the “dissident” move-ments in their purely defensive character. In contrast, I see that astheir greatest strength. I believe that this is precisely where thesemovements supersede the kind of politics from whose point of viewtheir program can seem so inadequate.

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In the “dissident” movements of the Soviet bloc, the defense of hu-man beings usually takes the form of a defense of human and civilrights as they are entrenched in various official documents suchas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International

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Covenants on Human Rights, the Concluding Act of the HelsinkiAgreement, and the constitutions of individual states. These move-ments set out to defend anyone who is being prosecuted for actingin the spirit of those rights, and they in turn act in the same spiritin their work, by insisting over and over again that the regime rec-ognize and respect human and civil rights, and by drawing atten-tion to the areas of life where this is not the case.

Their work, therefore, is based on the principle of legality: theyoperate publicly and openly, insisting not only that their activityis in line with the law, but that achieving respect for the law isone of their main aims. This principle of legality, which providesboth the point of departure and the framework for their activities,is common to all “dissident” groups in the Soviet bloc, even thoughindividual groups have never worked out any formal agreement onthat point. This circumstance raises an important question: Why,in conditions where a widespread and arbitrary abuse of power isthe rule, is there such a general and spontaneous acceptance ofthe principle of legality?

On the primary level, this stress on legality is a natural expres-sion of specific conditions that exist in the posa totalitarian sys-tem, and the consequence of an elementary understanding of thatspecificity. If there are in essence only two ways to struggle fora free society—that is, through legal means and through (armedor unarmed) revolt—then it should be obvious at once how inap-propriate the latter alternative is in the post-totalitarian system.Revolt is appropriate when conditions are clearly and openly inmotion, during a war, for example, or in situations where social orpolitical conflicts are coming to a head. It is appropriate in a clas-sical dictatorship that is either just setting itself up or is in a stateof collapse. In other words, it is appropriate where social forcesof comparable strength (for example, a government of occupationversus a nation fighting for its freedom) are confronting each otheron the level of actual power, or where there is a clear distinctionbetween the usurpers of power and the subjugated population, orwhen society finds itself in a state of open crisis. Conditions inthe post-totalitarian system—except in extremely explosive situa-tions like the one in Hungary in igg—are, of course, precisely theopposite. They are static and stable, and social crises, for the most

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part, exist only latently (though they run much deeper). Society isnot sharply polarized on the level of actual political power, but, aswe have seen, the fundamental lines of conflict run right througheach person. In this situation, no attempt at revolt could ever hopeto set up even a minimum of resonance in the rest of society, be-cause that society is soporific, submerged in a consumer rat raceand wholly involved in the post-totalitarian system (that is, partic-ipating in it and acting as agents of its automatism), and it wouldsimply find anything like revolt unacceptable. It would interpretthe revolt as an attack upon itself and, rather than supporting therevolt, it would very probably react by intensifying its bias towardthe system, since, in its view, the system can at least guarantee acertain quasi-legality. Add to this the fact that the post-totalitariansystem has at its disposal a complex mechanism of direct and in-direct surveillance that has no equal in history and it is clear thatnot only would any attempt to revolt come to a dead end politically,but it would also be almost technically impossible to carry off. Mostprobably it would be liquidated before it had a chance to translateits intentions into action. Even if revolt were possible, however, itwould remain the solitary gesture of a few isolated individuals andthey would be opposed not only by a gigantic apparatus of national(and supranational) power, but also by the very society in whosename they were mounting their revolt in the first place. (This, bythe way, is another reason why the regime and its propagandahave been ascribing terroristic aims to the “dissident” movementsand accusing them of illegal and conspiratorial methods.)

All of this, however, is not the main reason why the “dissi-dent” movements support the principle of legality. That reason liesdeeper, in the innermost structure of the “dissident” attitude. Thisattitude is and must be fundamentally hostile toward the notionof violent change—simply because it places its faith in violence.(Generally, the “dissident” attitude can only accept violence as anecessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can onlybe met by violence and where remaining passive would in effectmean supporting violence: let us recall, for example, that the blind-ness of European pacifism was one of the factors that prepared theground for.che Second World War.) As I have already mentioned,“dissidents” tend to be skeptical about political thought based on

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the faith that profound social changes can only be achieved bybringing about (regardless of the method) changes in the systemor in the government, and the belief that such changes—becausethey are considered “fundamental” justify the sacrifice of “less fun-damental” things, in other words, human lives. Respect for a the-oretical concept here outweighs respect for human life. Yet this isprecisely what threatens to enslave humanity all over again.

“Dissident” movements, as I have tried to indicate, share exactlythe opposite view. They understand systemic change as some-thing superficial, something secondary, something that in itselfcan guarantee nothing. Thus an attitude that turns away fromabstract political visions of the future toward concrete human be-ings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and nowis quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to allforms of violence carried out in the name of a better future, andby a profound belief that a future secured by violence might ac-tually be worse than what exists now; in other words, the futurewould be fatally stigmatized by the very means used to secure it.At the same time, this attitude is not to be mistaken for politicalconservatism or political moderation.. The “dissident” movementsdo not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow be-cause the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, becauseit does not seem radical enough. For them, the problem lies fartoo deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either gov-ernmental or technological. Some people, faithful to the classicalMarxist doctrines of the nineteenth century, understand our sys-tem as the hegemony of an exploiting class over an exploited classand, operating from the postulate that exploiters never surrendertheir power voluntarily, they see the only solution in a revolutionto sweep away the exploitersNaturally, they regard such things asthe struggle for human rights as something hopelessly legalistic, il-lusory, opportunistic, and ultimately misleading because it makesthe doubtful assumption that you can negotiate in good faith withyour exploiters on the basis of a false legality. The problem is thatthey are unable to find anyone determined enough to carry out thisrevolution, with the result that they become bitter, skeptical, pas-sive, and ultimately apathetic—in other words, they end up pre-cisely where the system wants them to be. This is one example

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of how far one can be misled by mechanically applying, in post-totalitarian circumstances, ideological models from another worldand another time.

Of course, one need not be an advocate of violent revolution toask whether an appeal to legality makes any sense at all when thelaws—and particularly the general laws concerning human rights—are no more than a facade, an aspect of the world of appearances, amere game behind which lies total manipulation. “They can ratifyanything because they will still go ahead and do whatever theywant anyway”—this is an opinion we often encounter. Is it not truethat constantly to take them at their word, to appeal to laws everychild knows are binding only as long as the government wishes,is in the end just a kind of hypocrisy, a ?vejkian obstructionismand, finally, just another way of playing the game, another formof self-delusion? In other words, is the legalistic approach at allcompatible with the principle of living within the truth?

This question can only be answered by first looking at the widerimplications of how the legal code functions in the post-totalitariansystem.

In a classical dictatorship, to a far greater extent than in thepost-totalitarian system, the will of the ruler is carried out directly,in an unregulated fashion. A dictatorship has no reason to hide itsfoundations, nor to conceal the real workings of power, and there-fore it need not encumber itself to any great extent with a legalcode. The posttotalitarian system, on the other hand, is utterlyobsessed with the need to bind everything in a single order: life insuch a state is thoroughly permeated by a dense network of regu-lations, proclamations, directives, norms, orders, and rules. (It isnot called a bureaucratic system without good reason.) A large pro-portion of those norms function as direct instruments of the com-plex manipulation of life that is intrinsic to the post-totalitariansystem. Individuals are reduced to little more than tiny cogs inan enormous mechanism and their significance is limited to theirfunction in this mechanism. Their job, housing accommodation,movements, social and cultural expressions, everything, in short,must be cosseted together as firmly as possible, predetermined,regulated, and controlled. Every aberration from the prescribedcourse of life is treated as error, license, and anarchy. From the

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cook in the restaurant who, without hard-to-get permission fromthe bureaucratic apparatus, cannot cook something special for hiscustomers, to the singer who cannot perform his new song at a con-cert without bureaucratic approval, everyone, in all aspects of theirlife, is caught in this regulatory tangle of red tape, the inevitableproduct of the post-totalitarian system. With ever-increasing con-sistency, it binds all the expressions and aims of life to the spiritof its own aims: the vested interests of its own smooth, automaticoperation.

In a narrower sense the legal code serves the posttotalitariansystem in this direct way as well, that is, it too forms a part ofthe world of regulations and prohibitions. At the same time, how-ever, it performs the same service in another indirect way, one thatbrings it remarkably closer—depending on which level of the law isinvolved—to ideology and in some cases makes it a direct compo-nent of that ideology.

Like ideology, the legal code functions as an excuse. It wrapsthe base exercise of power in the noble apparel of the letter of thelaw; it creates the pleasing illusion that justice is done, society pro-tected, and the exercise of power objectively regulated. All this isdone to conceal the real essence of posttotalitarian legal practice:the total manipulation of society. If an outside observer who knewnothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only itslaws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we werecomplaining about. The hidden political manipulation of the courtsand of public prosecutors, the limitations placed on lawyers abilityto defend their clients, the closed nature, de facto, of trials, thearbitrary actions of the security forces, their position of authorityover the judiciary, the absurdly broad application of several delib-erately vague sections of that code, and of course the states utterdisregard for the positive sections of that code (the rights of citi-zens): all of this would remain hidden from our outside observer.The only thing he would take away would be the impression thatour legal code is not much worse than the legal code of other civ-ilized countries, and not much different either, except perhaps forcertain curiosities, such as the entrenchment in the constitutionof a single political partys eternal rule and the states love for aneighboring superpower.

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But that is not all: if our observer had the opportunity to studythe formal side of the policing and judicial procedures and prac-tices, how they look “on paper,” he would discover that for themost part the common rules of criminal procedure are observed:charges are laid within the prescribed period following arrest, andit is the same with detention orders. Indictments are properly de-livered, the accused has a lawyer, and so on. In other words, ev-eryone has an excuse: they have all observed the law. In reality,however, they have cruelly and pointlessly ruined a young personslife, perhaps for no other reason than because he made samizdatcopies of a novel written by a banned writer, or because the policedeliberately falsified their testimony (as everyone knows, from thejudge on down to the defendant). Yet all of this somehow remainsin the background. The falsified testimony is not necessarily obvi-ous from the trial documents and the section of the Criminal Codedealing with incitement does not formally exclude the applicationof that charge to the copying of a banned novel. In other words, thelegal code—at least in several areas—is no more than a facade, anaspect of the world of appearances. Then why is it there at all? Forexactly the same reason as ideology is there: it provides a bridgeof excuses between the system and individuals, making it easierfor them to enter the power structure and serve the arbitrary de-mands of power. The excuse lets individuals fool themselves intothinking they are merely upholding the law and protecting societyfrom criminals. (Without this excuse, how much more difficult itwould be to recruit new generations of judges, prosecutors, andinterrogators!) As an aspect of the world of appearances, however,the legal code deceives not only the conscience of prosecutors, itdeceives the public, it deceives foreign observers, and it even de-ceives history itself.

Like ideology, the legal code is an essential instrument of ritualcommunication outside the power structure. It is the legal codethat gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules.It is the legal code that enables all components of the system tocommunicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish theirown legitimacy. It provides their whole game with its rules and en-gineers with their technology. Can the exercise of post-totalitarianpower be imagined at all without this universal ritual making it

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all possible, serving as a common language to bind the relevantsectors of the power structure together? The more important theposition occupied by the repressive apparatus in the power struc-ture, the more important that it function according to some kindof formal code. How, otherwise, could people be so easily and in-conspicuously locked up for copying banned books if there were nojudges, prosecutors, interrogators, defense lawyers, court stenog-raphers, and thick files, and if all this were not held together bysome firm order? And above all, without that innocent-lookingSection roo on incitement? This could all be done, of course, with-out a legal code and its accessories, but only in some ephemeraldictatorship run by a Ugandan bandit, not in a system that em-braces such a huge portion of civilized humankind and representsan integral, stable, and respected part of the modern world. Thatwould not only be unthinkable, it would quite simply be techni-cally impossible. Without the legal code functioning as a rituallycohesive force, the post-totalitarian system could not exist.

The entire role of ritual, facades, and excuses appears most elo-quently, of course, not in the proscriptive section of the legal code,which sets out what a citizen may not do and what the grounds forprosecution are, but in the section declaring what he may do andwhat his or her rights are. Here there is truly nothing but “words,words, words.” Yet even that part of the code is of immense impor-tance to the system, for it is here that the system establishes its le-gitimacy as a whole, before its own citizens, before schoolchildren,before the international public, and before history. The systemcannot afford to disregard this because it cannot permit itself tocast doubt upon the fundamental postulates of its ideology, whichare so essential to its very existence. (We have already seen howthe power structure is enslaved by its own ideology and its ideo-logical prestige.) To do this would be to deny everything it triesto present itself as and, thus, one of the main pillars on whichthe,system rests would be undermined: the integrity of the worldof appearances.

If the exercise of power circulates through the whole power struc-ture as blood flows through veins, then the legal code can be un-derstood as something that reinforces the walls of those veins.Without it, the blood of power could not circulate in an organized

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way and the body of society would hemorrhage at random. Orderwould collapse.

A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws—not just tothe laws concerning human rights, but to all laws—does not meanat all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that inour system the law is anything other than what it is. They are wellaware of the role it plays. But precisely because they know howdesperately the system depends on it—on the “noble” version ofthe law, that is—they also know how enormously significant suchappeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, be-cause it is hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending thelaws are observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such ap-peals. Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of livingwithin the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure atits point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such ap-peals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to societyand to those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attentionto its real material substance and thus, indirectly, compel all thosewho take refuge behind the law to affirm and make credible thisagency of excuses, this means of communication, this reinforce-ment of the social arteries outside of which their will could not bemade to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so forthe sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make onoutsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the systemsown mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion),or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being clumsyin handling the ritual. They have no other choice: because theycannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attendmore carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means toundermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual com-munications system. To assume that the laws are a mere facade,that they have no validity, and that therefore it is pointless to ap-peal to them would mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of thelaw that create the facade and the ritual. It would mean confirm-ing the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enablingthose who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest (and thereforethe most mendacious) form of their excuse.

I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors, or judges—

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if they were dealing with an experienced Chartist or a courageouslawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention (as individ-uals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity of theapparatus)—suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular carethat no cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the factthat a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but the veryexistence of the officials anxiety necessarily regulates, limits, andslows down the operation of that despotism.

This, of course, is not enough. But an essential part of the“dissident” attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the humanhere and now. It places more importance on often repeated andconsistent concrete action—even though it may be inadequate andthough it may ease only insignificantly the suffering of a singleinsignificant citizen—than it does in some abstract fundamentalsolution in an uncertain future. In any case, is not this in fact justanother form of “small-scale work” in the Masarykian sense, withwhich the “dissident” attitude seemed at first to be in such sharpcontradiction?

This section would be incomplete without stressing certain in-ternal limitations to the policy of taking them at their own word.The point is this: even in the most ideal of cases, the law is onlyone of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defend-ing what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the lawcan never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a ser-vice and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. Establishingrespect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life forthat, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully re-spected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one canimagine life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfectand imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always thequality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or re-press it, not merely whether they are upheld or not. (Often strictobservance of the law could have a disastrous impact on humandignity.) The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life doesnot lie either in the constitution or in the Criminal Code. Thesemerely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they canmake life easier or more difficult. They limit or permit, they pun-

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ish, tolerate, or defend, but they can never give life substance ormeaning. The struggle for what is called “legality” must constantlykeep this legality in perspective against the background of life as itreally is. Without keeping ones eyes open to the real dimensionsof lifes beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life,this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of someself-justifying system of scholastics. Without really wanting to, onewould thus become more and more like the observer who comesto conclusions about our system only on the basis of trial docu-ments and is satisfied if all the appropriate regulations have beenobserved.

XVIII

Is the basic job of the “dissident” movements is to serve truth, thatis, to serve the real aims of life, and if that necessarily developsinto a defense of individuals and their right to a free and truthfullife (that is, a defense of human rights and a struggle to see the lawsrespected), then another stage of this approach, perhaps the mostmature stage so far, is what Vclav Benda called the development of“parallel structures.”

When those who have decided to live within the truth have beendenied any direct influence on the existing social structures, notto mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when thesepeople begin to create what I have called the independent life ofsociety, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structuredin a certain way. Sometimes there are only very embryonic indica-tions of this process of structuring; at other times, the structuresare already quite well developed. Their genesis and evolution areinseparable from the phenomenon of “dissent,” even though theyreach far beyond the arbitrarily defined area of activity usually in-dicated by that term.

What are these structures? Ivan Jirous was the first in Czechoslo-vakia to formulate and apply in practice the concept of a “sec-ond culture.” Although at first he was thinking chiefly of non-conformist rock music and only certain literary, artistic, or per-formance events close to the sensibilities of those nonconformist

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musical groups, the term second culture very rapidly came to beused for the whole area of independent and repressed culture, thatis, not only for art and its various currents but also for the hu-manities, the social sciences, and philosophical thought. This sec-ond culture, quite naturally, has created elementary organizationalforms: samizdat editions of books and magazines, private perfor-mances and concerts, seminars, exhibitions, and so on. (In Polandall of this is vastly more developed: there are independent publish-ing houses and many more periodicals, even political periodicals;they have means of proliferation other than carbon copies, and soon. In the Soviet Union, samizdat has a longer tradition and clearlyits forms are quite different.) Culture, therefore, is a sphere inwhich the parallel structures can be observed in their most highlydeveloped form. Benda, of course, gives thought to potential or em-bryonic forms.of such structures in other spheres as well: from aparallel information network to parallel forms of education (privateuniversities), parallel trade unions, parallel foreign contacts, to akind of hypothesis on a parallel economy. On the basis of theseparallel structures, he then develops the notion of a “parallel polis”or state or, rather, he sees the rudiments of such a polis in thesestructures.

At a certain stage in its development, the independent life of so-ciety and the “dissident” movements cannot avoid a certain amountof organization and institutionalization. This is a natural develop-ment, and unless this independent life of society is somehow rad-ically suppressed and eliminated, the tendency will grow. Alongwith it, a parallel political life will also necessarily evolve, and to acertain extent it exists already in Czechoslovakia. Various group-ings of a more or less political nature will continue to define them-selves politically, to act and confront each other.

These parallel structures, it may be said, represent the most ar-ticulated expressions so far of living within the truth. One of themost important tasks the “dissident” movements have set them-selves is to support and develop them. Once again, it confirms thefact that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the sys-tem have their essential beginnings in the “pre-political” area. Forwhat else are parallel structures than an area where a differentlife can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and

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which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? Whatelse are those initial attempts at social self organization than theefforts of a certain part of society to live—as a society—within thetruth, to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianismand, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in theposttotalitarian system? What else is it but a nonviolent attemptby people to negate the system within themselves and to establishtheir lives on a new basis, that of their own proper identity? Anddoes this tendency not confirm once more the principle of return-ing the focus to actual individuals? After all, the parallel structuresdo not grow a priori out of a theoretical vision of systemic changes(there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life andthe authentic needs of real people. In fact, all eventual changes inthe system, . changes we may observe here in their rudimentaryforms, have come about as it were de facto, from “below,” becauselife compelled them to, not because they came before life, somehowdirecting it or forcing some change on it.

Historical experience teaches us that any genuinely meaningfulpoint of departure in an individuals life usually has an element ofuniversality about it. In other words, it is not something partial, ac-cessible only to a restricted community, and not transferable to anyother. On the contrary, it must be potentially accessible to every-one; it must foreshadow a general solution and, thus, it is not justthe expression of an introverted, self contained responsibility thatindividuals have to and for themselves alone, but responsibility toand for the world. Thus it would be quite wrong to understand theparallel structures and the parallel polis as a retreat into a ghettoand as an act of isolation, addressing itself only to the welfare ofthose who had decided on such a course, and who are indifferentto the rest. It would be wrong, in short, to consider it an essentiallygroup solution that has nothing to do with the general situation.Such a concept would, from the start, alienate the notion of livingwithin the truth from its proper point of departure, which is con-cern for others, transforming it ultimately into just another moresophisticated ver sion of living within a lie. In doing so, of course,it would cease to be a genuine point of departure for individualsand groups and would recall the false notion of “dissidents” as anexclusive group with exclusive interests, carrying on their own ex-

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clusive dialogue with the powers that be. In any case, even themost highly developed forms of life in the parallel structures, eventhat most mature form of the parallel polis can only exist—at leastin post-totalitarian circumstances—when the individual is at thesame time lodged in the “first,” official structure by a thousand dif-ferent relationships, even though it may only be the fact that onebuys what one needs in their stores, uses their money, and obeystheir laws. Certainly one can imagine life in its baser aspects flour-ishing in the parallel polis, but would not such a life, lived delib-erately that way, as a program, be merely another version of theschizophrenic life within a lie which everyone else must live in oneway or another? Would it not just be further evidence that a pointof departure that is not a model solution, that is not applicableto others, cannot be meaningful for an individual either? Pato?kaused to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility isthat we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibil-ity is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in thisplace in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and thatwe cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whetherit be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel podis. If Western youngpeople so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery failsthem as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously be-cause, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, sincenot everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an exampleof an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here andnow—but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may availthemselves of it.

In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makessense only as an act of deepening ones responsibility to and for thewhole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for thisresponsibility, not as an escape from it.

XIX

I have already talked about the political potential of living withinthe truth and of the limitations on predicting whether, how, andwhen a given expression of that life within the truth can lead to

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actual changes. I have also mentioned how irrelevant trying tocalculate the risks in this regard are, for an essential feature ofindependent initiatives is that they are always, initially at least, anall-or-nothing gamble.

Nevertheless, this outline of some of the work done by “dissi-dent” movements would be incomplete without considering, if onlyvery generally, some of the different ways this work might actuallyaffect society; in other words, about the ways that responsibility toand for the whole might (without necessarily meaning that it must)be realized in practice.

In the first place, it has to be emphasized that the whole spherecomprising the independent life of society, and even more so the“dissident” movement as such, is naturally far from being the onlypotential factor that might influence the history of countries livingunder the post-totalitarian system. The latent social crisis in suchsocieties can at any time, independently of these movements, pro-voke a wide variety of political changes. It may unsettle the powerstructure and induce or accelerate various hidden confrontations,resulting in personnel, conceptual, or at least “climactic” changes.It may significantly influence the general atmosphere of life, evokeunexpected and unforeseen social unrest and explosions of discon-tent. Power shifts at the center of the bloc can influence conditionsin the different countries in various ways. Economic factors nat-urally have an important influence, as do broader trends of globalcivilization. An extremely important area, which could be a sourceof radical changes and political upsets, is represented by interna-tional politics, the policies adopted by the other superpower and allthe other countries, the changing structure of international inter-ests and the positions taken by our bloc. Even the people who endup in the highest positions are not without significance, althoughas I have already said, one ought not overestimate the importanceof leading personalities in the post-totalitarian system. There aremany such influences and combinations of influence, and the even-tual political impact of the “dissident” movement is thinkable onlyagainst this general background and in the context that this back-ground provides. That impact is only one of the many factors (andfar from the most important one) that affect political developments,and it differs from the other factors perhaps only in that its es-

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sential focus is reflecting upon that political development from thepoint of view of a defense of people and seeking an immediate ap-plication of that reflection.

The primary purpose of the outward direction of these move-ments is always, as we have seen, to have an impact on society,not to affect the power structure, at least not directly and imme-diately. Independent initiatives address the hidden sphere; theydemonstrate that living within the truth is a human and social al-ternative and they struggle to expand the space available for thatlife; they help—even though it is, of course, indirect help—to raisethe confidence of citizens; they shatter the world of appearancesand unmask the real nature of power. They do not assume a mes-sianic role; they are not a social avant-garde or elite that aloneknows best, and whose task it is to “raise the consciousness” ofthe “unconscious” masses (that arrogant self-projection is, onceagain, intrinsic to an essentially different way of thinking, the kindthat feels it has a patent on some ideal project and therefore that ithas the right to impose it on society). Nor do they want to lead any-one. They leave it up to each individual to decide what he will orwill not take from their experience and work. (If official Czechoslo-vak propaganda described the Chartists as “self appointees,” it wasnot in order to emphasize any real avantgarde ambitions on theirpart, but rather a natural ex pression of how the regime thinks,its tendency to judge others according to itself, since behind anyexpression of criticism it automatically sees the desire to cast themighty from their seats and rule in their places “in the name of thepeople,” the same pretext the regime itself has used for years.)

These movements, therefore, always affect the power structureas such indirectly, as a part of society as a whole, for they areprimarily addressing the hidden spheres of society, since it is nota matter of confronting the regime on the level of actual power.

I have already indicated one of the ways this can work: anawareness of the laws and the responsibility for seeing that theyare upheld is indirectly strengthened. That, of course, is only a spe-cific instance of a far broader influence, the indirect pressure feltfrom living within the truth: the pressure created by free thought,alternative values and alternative behavior, and by independentsocial self-realization. The power structure, whether it wants to or

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not, must always react to this pressure to a certain extent. Its re-sponse, however, is always limited to two dimensions: repressionand adaptation. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other.For example, the Polish “flying university” came under increasedpersecution and the “flying teachers” were detained by the police.At the same time, however, professors in existing official universi-ties tried to enrich their own curricula with several subjects hith-erto considered taboo and this was a result of indirect pressureexerted by the “flying university.” The motives for this adaptationmay vary from the ideal (the hidden sphere has received the mes-sage and conscience and the will to truth are awakened) to thepurely utilitarian: the regimes instinct for survival compels it tonotice the changing ideas and Lhe changing mental and social cli-mate and to react flexibly to them. Which of these motives happensto predominate in a given moment is not essential in terms of thefinal effect.

Adaptation is the positive dimension of the regim s response,and it can, and usually does, have a wide spectrum of forms andphases. Some circles may try to integrate values of people from the“parallel world” into the official structures, to appropriate them,to become a little like them while trying to make them a little likethemselves, and thus to adjust an obvious and untenable imbal-ance. In the 1960s, progressive communists began to “discover”certain unacknowledged cultural values and phenomena. This wasa positive step, al though not without its dangers, since the “in-tegrated” or “appropriated” values lost something of their indepen-dence and originality, and having been given a cloak of officialityand conformity, their credibility was somewhat weakened. In afurther phase, this adaptation can lead to various attempts on thepart of the official structures to reform, both in terms of their ul-timate goals and structurally. Such reforms are usually halfwaymeasures; they are attempts to combine and realistically coordi-nate serving life and serving the posttotalitarian automatism. Butthey cannot be otherwise. They muddy what was originally a cleardemarcation line between living within the truth and living witha lie. They cast a smokescreen over the situation, mystify soci-ety, and make it difficult for people to keep their bearings. This,of course, does not alter the fact that it is always essentially good

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when it happens because it opens out new spaces. But it doesmake it more difficult to distinguish between “admissible” and “in-admissible” compromises.

Another—and higher—phase of adaptation is a process of inter-nal differentiation that takes place in the official structures. Thesestructures open themselves to more or less institutionalized formsof plurality because the real aims of life demand it. (One exam-ple: without changing the centralized and institutional basis of cul-tural life, new publishing houses, group periodicals, artists groups,parallel research institutes and workplaces, and so on, may ap-pear under pressure from below. Or another example: the single,monolithic youth organization run by the state as a typical post-totalitarian “transmission belt” disintegrates under the pressure ofreal needs into a number of more or less independent organizationssuch as the Union of University Students, the Union of SecondarySchool Students, the Organization of Working Youth, and so on.)There is a direct relationship between this kind of differentiation,which allows initiatives from below to be felt, and the appearanceand constitution of new structures which are already parallel, orrather independent, but which at the same time are respected, orat least tolerated in varying degrees, by official institutions. Thesenew institutions are more than just liberalized official structuresadapted to the authentic needs of life; they are a direct expressionof those needs, demanding a position in the context of what is al-ready here. In other words, they are genuine expressions of thetendency of society to organize itself. (In Czechoslovakia in 1968the best-known organizations of this type were KAN, the Club ofCommitted Non-Communists, and K231, an organization of formerpolitical prisoners.)

The ultimate phase of this process is the situation in which theofficial structures—as agencies of the post-totalitarian system, ex-isting only to serve its automatism and constructed in the spiritof that role—simply begin withering away and dying off, to be re-placed by new structures that have evolved from below and are puttogether in a fundamentally different way.

Certainly many other ways may be imagined in which.the aimsof life can bring about political transformations in the general or-ganization of things and weaken on all levels the hold that tech-

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niques of manipulation have on society. Here I have mentionedonly the way in which the general. organization of things wasin fact changed as we experienced it ourselves in Czechoslovakiaaround 1968. It must be added that all these concrete instanceswere part of a specific historical process which ought not be thoughtof as the only alternative, nor as necessarily repeatable (particu-larly not in our country), a fact which, of course, takes nothingaway from the importance of the general lessons which are stillsought and found in it to this day.

While on the subject of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, it may be ap-propriate to point to some of the characteristic aspects of devel-opments at that time. All the transformations, first in the.generalmood, then conceptually, and finally structurally, did not occurunder pressure from the kind of parallel structures that are tak-ing shape today. Such structures—which are sharply defined an-titheses of the official structures—quite simply did not exist at thetime, nor were there any “dissidents” in the present sense of theword. The changes that took place were simply a consequenceof pressures of the most varied sort, some thoroughgoing, somepartial. There were spontaneous attempts at freer forms of think-ing, independent creation, and political articulation. There werelongterm, spontaneous, and inconspicuous efforts to bring aboutthe interpenetration of the independent life of society with the exist-ing structures, usually beginning with the quiet institutionalizationof this life on and around the periphery of the official structures. Inother words, it was a gradual process of social awakening, a kindof creeping process in which the hidden spheres gradually openedout. (There is some truth in the official propaganda which talksabout a “creeping counterrevolution” in Czechoslovakia, referringto how the aims of life proceed.) The motive force behind this awak-ening did not have to come exclusively from the independent life ofsociety, considered as a definable social milieu (although of courseit did come from there, a fact that has yet to be fully appreciated).It could also simply have come from the fact that people in theofficial structures who more or less identified with the official ide-ology came up against reality as it really was and as it graduallybecame clear to them through latent social crises and their ownbitter experiences with the true nature and operations of power.

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(I am thinking here mainly of the many antidogmatic reform com-munists who grew to become, over the years, a force inside theofficial structures.) Neither the proper conditions nor the raisondtre existed for those limited, “self-structuring” independent initia-tives familiar from the present era of “dissident” movements thatstand so sharply outside the official structures and are unrecog-nized by them en bloc. At that time, the. posttotalitarian systemin Czechoslovakia had not yet petrified into the static, sterile, andstable forms that exist today, forms that compel people to fall backon their own organizing capabilities. For many historical and socialreasons, the regime in 1968 was more open. The power structure,exhausted by Stalinist despotism and helplessly groping about forpainless reform, was inevitably rotting from within, quite incapableof offering any intelligent opposition to changes in the mood, to theway its younger members regarded things and to the thousands ofauthentic expressions of life on the “prepolitical” level that sprangup in that vast political terrain between the official and the unoffi-cial.

From the more general point of view, yet another typical cir-cumstance appears to be important: the social ferment that cameto a head in 1968 never—in terms of actual structural changes—went any further than the reform, the differentiation, or the re-placement of structures that were really only of secondary impor-tance. It did not affect the very essence of the power structurein the post-totalitarian system, which is to say its political model,the fundamental principles of social organization, not even the eco-nomic model in which all economic power is subordinated to polit-ical power. Nor were any essential structural changes made in thedirect instruments of power (the army, the police, the judiciary,etc.). On that level, the issue was never more than a change inthe mood, the personnel, the political line and, above all changesin how that power was exercised. Everything else remained at thestage of discussion and planning. The two officially accepted pro-grams that went furthest in this regard were che April 1968 Ac-tion Program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and theproposal for economic reforms. The Action Program—it could nothave been otherwise—was full of contradictions and halfway mea-sures that left the physical aspects of power untouched. And the

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economic proposals, while they went a long way to accommodatethe aims of life in the economic sphere (they accepted such no-tions as a plurality of interests and initiatives, dynamic incentives,restrictions upon the economic command system), left untouchedthe basic pillar of economic power, that is, the principle of state,rather than genuine social ownership of the means of production.So there is a gap here which no social movement in the postto-talitarian system has ever been able to bridge, with the possibleexception of those few days during the Hungarian uprising.

What other developmental alternative might emerge in the fu-ture? Replying to that question would mean entering the realm ofpure speculation. For the time being, it can be said that the la-tent social crisis in the system has always (and there is no reasonto believe it will not continue to do so) resulted in a variety of po-litical and social disturbances. (Germany in 1963, Hungary, theU.S.S.R. and Poland in 1956, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1968,and Poland in 1970 and 1976), all of them very different in theirbackgrounds, the course of their evolution, and their final conse-quences. If we look at the enormous complex of different factorsthat led to such disturbances, and at the impossibility of predictingwhat accidental accumulation of events will cause that fermenta-tion in the hidden sphere to break through to the light of day (theproblem of the “final straw”); and if we consider how impossibleit is to guess what the Future holds, given such opposing trendsas, on the one hand, the increasingly profound integration of the“bloc” and the expansion of power within it, and on the other handthe prospects of the U.S.S.R. disintegrating under pressure fromawakening national consciousness in the non-Russian areas (inthis regard the Soviet Union cannot expect to remain forever free ofthe worldwide struggle For national liberation), then we must seethe hopelessness of trying to make long-range predictions.

In any case, I do not believe that this type of speculation has anyimmediate significance for the “dissident” movements since thesemovements, after all, do not develop from speculative thinking, andso to establish themselves on that basis would mean alienatingthemselves from the very source of their identity.

As far as prospects for the “dissident” movements as such go,there seems to be very little likelihood that future developments

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will lead to a lasting co-existence of two isolated, mutually nonin-teracting and mutually indifferent bodies the main polis and theparallel polis. As long as it remains what it is, the practice of livingwithin the truth cannot fail to be a threat to the system. It is quiteimpossible to imagine it continuing to co-exist with the practice ofliving within a lie without dramatic tension. The relationship ofthe posttotalitarian system—as long as it remains what it is—andthe independent life of society—as long as it remains the locus of arenewed responsibility for the whole and to the whole—will alwaysbe one of either latent or open conflict.

In this situation there are only two possibilities: either the post-totalitarian system will go on developing (that is, will be able togo on developing), thus inevitably coming closer to some dreadfulOrwellian vision of a world of absolute manipulation, while all themore articulate expressions of living within the truth are definitelysnuffed out; or the independent life of society (the parallel polis),including the “dissident” movements, will slowly but. surely be-come a social phenomenon of growing importance, taking a realpart in the life of society with increasing clarity and influencing thegeneral situation. Of course this will always be only one of manyfactors influencing the situation and it will operate rather in thebackground, in concert with the other factors and in a way appro-priate to the background.

Whether it ought to focus on reforming the official structuresor on encouraging differentiation, or on replacing them with newstructures, whether the intent is to ameliorate the system or, onthe contrary, to tear it down: these and similar questions, insofaras they are not pseudo-problems, can be posed by the “dissident”movement only within the context of a particular situation, whenthe movement is faced with a concrete task. In other words, it mustpose questions, as it were, ad hoc, out of a concrete considerationof the authentic needs of life. To reply to such questions abstractlyand to formulate a political program in terms of some hypotheticalfuture would mean, I believe, a return to the spirit and methods oftraditional politics, and this would limit and alienate the work of“dissent” where it is most intrinsically itself and has the most gen-uine prospects for the future. I have already emphasized severaltimes that these “dissident” movements do not have their point of

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departure in the invention of systemic changes but in a real, ev-eryday struggle for a better life here and now. The political andstructural systems that life discovers for itself will clearly alwaysbe—for some time to come, at least—limited, halfway, unsatisfying,and polluted by debilitating tactics. It cannot be otherwise, and wemust expect this and not be demoralized by it. It is of great im-portance that the main thing—the everyday, thankless, and neverending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, andin quiet dignity—never impose any limits on itself, never be half-hearted, inconsistent, never trap itself in political tactics, specu-lating on the outcome of its actions or entertaining fantasies aboutthe future. The purity of this struggle is the best guarantee ofoptimum results when it comes to actual interaction with the post-totalitarian structures.

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The specific nature of post-totalitarian conditions—with their ab-sence of a normal political life and the fact that any far—reachingpolitical change is utterly unforeseeable—has one positive aspect:it compels us to examine our situation in terms of its deeper co-herences and to consider our future in the context of global, long-range prospects of the world of which we are a part. The fact thatthe most intrinsic and fundamental confrontation between humanbeings and the system takes place at a level incomparably moreprofound than that of traditional politics would seem, at the sametime, to determine as well the direction such considerations willtake.

Our attention, therefore, inevitably turns to the most essentialmatter: the crisis of contemporary technological society as a whole,the crisis that Heidegger describes as the ineptitude of humanityface to face with the planetary power of technology. Technology—that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modernmetaphysics—is out of humanitys control, has ceased to serve us,has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the prepara-tion of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out:we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a politi-

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cal conception to help us bring things back under human control.We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we havecreated inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural af-filiations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of thatword, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes usfrom the experience of Being and casts us into the world of “exis-tences.” This situation has already been described from many dif-ferent angles and many individuals and social groups have sought,often painfully, to find ways out of it (for instance, through orien-tal thought or by forming communes). The only social, or ratherpolitical, at tempt to do something about it that contains the nec-essary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole)is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voiceof the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limitedto a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dic-tatorship of technology.

“Only a God can save us now,” Heidegger says, and he empha-sizes the necessity of “a different way of thinking,” that is, of adeparture from what philosophy has been for centuries, and a rad-ical change in the way in which humanity understands itself, theworld, and its position in it. He knows no way out and all he canrecommend is “preparing expectations.”

Various thinkers and movements feel that this as yet unknownway out might be most generally characterized as a broad “existen-tial revolution: I share this view, and I also share the opinion thata solution cannot be sought in some technological sleight of hand,that is, in some external proposal for change, or in a revolutionthat is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, oreven merely political. These are all areas where the consequencesof an existential revolution can and must be felt; but their most in-trinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest senseof the word. It is only from that basis that it can become a gener-ally ethical—and, of course, ultimately a political—reconstitutionof society.

What we call the consumer and industrial (or postindustrial)society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as “the revolt of themasses,” as well as the intellectual, moral, political, and socialmisery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect

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of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along bythe automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself.

The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect—a particularlydrastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins—of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master ofits own situation. The automatism of the posttotalitarian systemis merely an extreme version of the global automatism of techno-logical civilization. The human failure that it mirrors is only onevariant of the general failure of modern humanity.

This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in theworld is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the onlydifference being the social and political forms it takes. Heideggerrefers expressly to a crisis of democracy. There is no real evidencethat Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional par-liamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound.It may even be said that the more room there is in the Westerndemocracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life,the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply dothey become immersed in it.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democraciescan offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of techno-logical civilization and the industrial-cousumer society, for they,too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manip-ulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined thanthe brutal methods used in the posttotalitarian societies. But thisstatic complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically prag-matic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses andreleasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal re-sponsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulationengaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresentdictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce,consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so of-ten analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imag-ined as the source of humanitys rediscovery of itself In his June1978 Harvard lecture, Solzhenitsyn describes the illusory natureof freedoms not based on personal responsibility and the chronicinability of the traditional democracies, as a result, to oppose vi-olence and totalitarianism. In a democracy, human beings may

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enjoy many .personal freedoms and securities that are unknownto us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ulti-mately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of de-fending their concerns about their own identity or preventing theirsuperficialization or transcending concerns about their own per-sonal survival to become proud and responsible members of thepolis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny.

Because all our prospects for a significant change for the bet-ter are very long range indeed, we are obliged to take note of thisdeep crisis of traditional democracy. Certainly, if conditions wereto be created for democracy in some countries in the Soviet bloc(although this is becoming increasingly improbable), it might bean appropriate transitional solution that would help to restore thedevastated premise of civic awareness, to renew democratic dis-cussion, to allow for the crystallization of an elementary politicalplurality, an essential expression of the aims of life. But to clingto the notion of traditional parliamentary democracy as ones polit-ical ideal and to succumb to the illusion that only this tried andtrue form is capable of guaranteeing human beings enduring dig-nity and an independent role in society would, in my opinion, be atthe very least shortsighted.

I see a renewed focus of politics on real people as somethingfar more profound than merely returning to the everyday mecha-nisms of Western (or, if you like, bourgeois) democracy. In 1968,I felt that our problem could be solved by forming an oppositionparty that would compete publicly for power with the CommunistParty. I have long since come to realize, however, that it is justnot that simple and that no opposition party in and of itself,justas no new electoral laws in and of themselves, could make societyproof against some new form of violence. No “dry” organizationalmeasures in themselves can provide that guarantee, and we wouldbe hard-pressed to find in them that God who alone can save us.

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And now I may properly be asked the question: What then is to bedone?

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My skepticism toward alternative political models and the abil-ity of systemic reforms or changes to redeem us does not, of course,mean that I am skeptical of political thought altogether. Nor doesmy emphasis on the importance of focusing concern on real hu-man beings disqualify me from considering the possible structuralconsequences flowing from it. On the contrary, if A was said, thenB should be said as well. Nevertheless, I will offer only a few verygeneral remarks.

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of amoral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal ofthe relationship of human beings to what I have called the “hu-man order,” which no political order can replace. A new experienceof being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly graspedsense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship toother people and to the human community—these factors clearlyindicate the direction in which we must go.

And the political consequences? Most probably they could bereflected in the constitution of structures that will derive from thisnew spirit, from human factors rather than from a particular for-malization of political relationships and guarantees. In other words,the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, re-sponsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures that are notaimed at the technical aspect of the execution of power, but at thesignificance of that execution in structures held together more bya commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain commu-nities than by commonly shared expansionist ambitions directedoutward. There can and must be structures that are open, dy-namic, and small; beyond a certain point, human ties like per-sonal trust and personal responsibility cannot work. There mustbe structures that in principle place no limits on the genesis of dif-ferent structures. Any accumulation of power whatsoever (one ofthe characteristics of automatism) should be profoundly alien toit. They would be structures not in the sense of organizations orinstitutions, but like a community. Their authority certainly can-not be based on long-empty traditions, like the tradition of masspolitical parties, but rather on how, in concrete terms, they enterinto a given situation. Rather than a strategic agglomeration offormalized organizations, it is better to have organizations spring-

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ing up ad hoc, infused with enthusiasm for a particular purposeand disappearing when that purpose has been achieved. The lead-ers authority ought to derive from their personalities and be per-sonally tested in their particular surroundings, and not from theirposition in any nomenklatura. They should enjoy great personalconfidence and even great lawmaking powers based on that confi-dence. This would appear to be the only way out of the classic im-potence of traditional democratic organizations, which frequentlyseem founded more on mistrust than mutual confidence, and moreon collective irresponsibility than on responsibility. It is only withthe full existential backing of every member of the community thata permanent bulwark against creeping totalitarianism can be es-tablished. These structures should naturally arise from below as aconsequence of authentic social self-organization; they should de-rive vital energy from a living dialogue with the genuine needs fromwhich they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structuresshould also disappear. The principles of their internal organizationshould be very diverse, with a minimum of external regulation. Thedecisive criterion of this self-constitution should be the structuresactual significance, and not just a mere abstract norm.

Both political and economic life ought to be founded on the var-ied and versatile cooperation of such dynamically appearing anddisappearing organizations. As far as the economic life of societygoes, I believe in the principle of self-management, which is prob-ably the only way of achieving what all the theorists of socialismhave dreamed about, that is, the genuine (i.e., informal) participa-tion of workers in economic decision making, leading to a feelingof genuine responsibility for their collective work. The principles ofcontrol and discipline ought to be abandoned in favor of self-controland self-discipline.

As is perhaps clear from even so general an outline, the sys-temic consequences of an existential revolution of this type go sig-nificantly beyond the framework of classical parliamentary democ-racy. Having introduced the term “posttotalitarian” for the pur-poses of this discussion, perhaps I should refer to the notion I havejust outlined—purely for the moment—as the prospects for a “post-democratic” system.

Undoubtedly this notion could be developed further, but I think

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it would be a foolish undertaking, to say the least, because slowlybut surely the whole idea would become alienated, separated fromitself. After all, the essence of such a “post-democracy” is also thatit can only develop via facti, as a process deriving directly fromlife, from a new atmosphere and a new spirit (political thought, ofcourse, would play a role here, though not as a director, merely asa guide). It would be presumptuous, however, to try to foresee thestructural expressions of this new spirit without that spirit actuallybeing present and without knowing its concrete physiognomy.

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I would probably have omitted the entire preceding section as amore suitable subject for private meditation were it not for a cer-tain recurring sensation. It may seem rather presumptuous, andtherefore I will present it as a question: Does not this vision of“post-democratic” structures in some ways remind one of the “dis-sident” groups or some of the independent citizens initiatives aswe already know them from our own surroundings? Do not thesesmall communities, bound together by thousands of shared tribu-lations, give rise to some of those special humanly meaningfulpolitical relationships and ties that we have been talking about?Are not these communities (and they are communities more thanorganizations)—motivated mainly by a common belief in the pro-found significance of what they are doing since they have no chanceof direct, external success joined together by precisely the kind ofatmosphere in which the formalized and ritualized ties common inthe official structures are supplanted by a living sense of solidarityand fraternity? Do not these “post-democratic” relationships of im-mediate personal trust and the informal rights of individuals basedon them come out of the background of all those commonly shareddifficulties? Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear un-der pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened bythe ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to create anarticulate form of living within the truth and to renew the feeling ofhigher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of somekind of rudimentary moral reconstitution?

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In other words, are not these informed, nonbureaucratic, dy-namic, and open communities that comprise the “parallel polis” akind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those moremeaningful “post-democratic” political structures that might be-come the foundation of a better society?

I know from thousands of personal experiences how the merecircumstance of having signed Charter 77 has immediately createda deeper and more open relationship and evoked sudden and pow-erful feelings of genuine community among people who were all butstrangers before. This kind of thing happens only rarely, if at all,even among people who have worked together for long periods insome apathetic official structure. It is as though the mere aware-ness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experiencewere enough to transform people and the climate of their lives, asthough it gave their public work a more human dimension than is.seldom found elsewhere.

Perhaps all this is only the consequence of a common threat.Perhaps the moment the threat ends or eases, the mood it helpedcreate will begin to dissipate as well. (The aim of those who threatenus, however, is precisely the opposite. Again and again, one isshocked by the energy they devote to contaminating, in various de-spicable ways, all the human relationships inside the threatenedcommunity.)

Yet even if that were so, it would change nothing in the questionI have posed.

We do not know the way out of the marasmus of the world,and it would be an expression of unforgivable pride were we to seethe little we do as a fundamental solution, or were we to presentourselves, our community, and our solutions to vital problems asthe only thing worth doing.

Even so, I think that given all these preceding thoughts on post-totalitarian conditions, and given the circumstances and the innerconstitution of the developing efforts to defend human beings andtheir identity in such conditions, the questions I have posed are ap-propriate. If nothing else, they are an invitation to reflect concretelyon our own experience and to give some thought to whether certainelements of that experience do not—without our really being awareof it—point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits, and

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whether right here, in our everyday lives, certain challenges are notalready encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will beread and grasped.

For the real question is whether the brighter future is reallyalways so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for along time already, and only our own blindness and weakness hasprevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept usfrom developing it?

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